e DOCUMENT RESUME ED 240008

e DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 240008 CS 208 180

AUTHOR Hayes, John R.;! Flower, Linda S.TITLE , A Cognitive Model of the Writing Process in Adults.

..-..- Final Report.INSTITUTION Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, Pa.SPOIL'S AGENCY National Inst. of Education (ED), Washington, DC.PUB DATE 11 Oct 83GRANT NIE-F-78-01.95NOTE 92p.; Figures and tables may be marginally

legible.PUB TYPE Reports - Research/Technical (143)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC04 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Academic Aptitude; *Cognitive Processes; College

Students; Expository Writing; Higher Education;Models; Planning; *Research Methodology; WritingImprovement; *Writing Processes; *Writing Research;*Writing Skills

IDENTIFIERS *Protocol Analysis

ABSTRACTA research project was undertaken to (1) identify the

major cognitive processes involved in expository writing, (2) test amodel of the organization of those processes, and (3) identifyteachable aids that could be used by poor and average adult writersto improve the'r writing skills. Subjects were expert and novicestudent writers at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania. The research method employed was that of protocolanalysis, with each student being asked to think aloud as he or sheperformed writing tasks. The resulting tapes were analyzed todiscover the cognitive processes involved in writing and to develop amodel of composition. The findings suggest the following: (1) thereare important differences in the ways expert and novice writershandle the writing process, (2) many of the strategies employed byexpert writer! are teachable, and (3) one of the most promising areasfor improving students' writing is in tha art of planning. (Charts,tables of data, and excerpts from student protocols are appended.)(FL)

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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made* from the original document.**********************************************************t************

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Final Reporton Grant NIE-F-78-0195

A Cognitive Model of the Writing Process in Adults

John R. Hayes and Linda S. Flower

Carnegie-Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

11 October 1983

4

Hayes/Flower

ABSTRACT

The ability to write effectively is important for achievemett in post-secondary education and in professional life. Yet the ability to usewriting as a practical and intellectual skill has eluded many adults.The three main objectives of this research project on adult writingwere to identify the major cognitive processes involved in expositorywriting; to test a model of the organization of these processes; and toidentify teachable aids which could be used by poor and average adultwriters to improve their writing skills.

Subjects for the project were competent and non-competent writers atCarnegie-Mellon University. The research method employed was that ofprotocol analysis; each student was asked to think aloud as he performedwriting tasks. These protocols enabled the principal investigators tobetter understand the cognitive processes involved in writing and todevelop a model of composition.

This research on the composing process has a number of implications forteaching including these three important observations: 1.) There areimportant differences in how expert and novice writers handle the processof writing; 2.) Many of the strategies employed by experienced writersare teachable; and 3.) One of the most promising areas for improvingstudents' writing is in the neglected art of planning. Teaching studentsto plan what and what to say and to learn while they write can offerthem a very useful skill.

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nirrilibMINMAIMIlar.

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Table of Contents1. Introduction 1

1.1. Strategic Decision:. 1

1.2. The Task Environmont 6,.3. The Writers Long-Term Memory 6

2. A Model of the Writing Process 62.1. The Writing Prccess 72.2. Planning: Generatlrg 7

2.3. Planning: Orgarizing 8

2.4. Planning: Goo: Setting 9

2.4.1. Translating 9

2.4.2. Reviewing 10

2.4.3. The Monitor 12

2.5. Testing tne Model 132.6. Protocol Sections 15

2.7. HYPOTHESIS 1: The Form of the Written Materials 16

2.8. HYPOTHESIS 2: Classifying "Content" Statements 17

2.9. HYPOTHESIS 3: Measuring Retrieval Chains 202.10. Conclusions 21

3. The Dynamics of Composing 22

3.1. Introduction 22

3.2 Knowledge 23

3.3. Written Speech 24

4 Cognition of Discovery 26

4.1. Studying Cognitive Processes 27

4 2. A Model of the Rhetorical Problem 284.3. Differencees Among Writers 28

5 A Taxonomy of Writing Plans 31

5 1. Plans To Do 31

5 2 Piens To Stsy 32

5 3 Composing Plans 32

6. The Pregnant Pause 35

6.1. Evidence for an Episode Structure 37

7. Evaluating How Writers Generate !leas 39

7 1. Results 42

8 Furmulat,ng Sentences :n Writing 43

8 1 The Relation Bet.yeen Planning and Sentence Construction 44

82 What Happens When Sentences Are Written? 47

8 3 Diffeeences Bi.:Neen Experts and Non-experts 49

9. Implications for Teaching 51

9.1 Implication 1 51

, 9.2. Implication 2 53

9.3 Implication 3 54

9 4 Teaching Planning Versus Doing it 57

9 5 A Plan To Do 59

96 A Plan To Sav 60

9 7 A Plan To Discover 61

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1. Introduction

During the last three years of research supported by ME, we have applied protocol

analysis and other methods of cognitive science to the analysis of written composition.

In conducting our research we have made a number of strategic decisions about what is

interesting and about how best to proceed. These decisions are the incarnation of our

scientific biases.

1.1. Strategic Decisions

Our approach proceeds from five strategic decisions which we made about how to

conduct our research. Briefly these decisions were:

1. to focus on the act of writing:

2 to try for a process model of writing,

3. to model individual writers;

4. to work wholistically or lop down"; and

5. to divide the writing task ori.o parts for easier analysis.

As we will see below, these decisions are genuine ones in the sense that we could

reasonably have made other choices. Alternative approaches to the study of writing

proceed from different decisions on these same issues.

1. Our first and most important decision was to focus on the act of writing -- that

is, to attend to vvriatever it is that writers do when they produce a text. Thus, we viewed

writing primarily as a process rather than as a product We felt tnat by far the richest

source of information about writing would be to observe step by step how the writer had

actually created the essay. However, we did not intend to ignore the product. Wherever

possible, we looked to the writer's essay for evidence to confirm or elaborate the more

direct observations of process

To observe writers in action we have employed process training methods borrowed

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from cognitive psychology. In our studies, a typical experiment proceeds as follows:

subjects appear at the experimental session knowing that they will be assigned a topic on

which to write an essay and that the whole procedure will take about an hour. Further,

they know that they will be asked to "think aloud" while writing. The subject is seated in

a quiet office with a desk pencil, and paper, and the tape recorder is turned on. The

experimenter then gives the subject an envelope containing the writing assignment

-- that is, the topic and the intended audience. The subject then busily sets to work

writing and commenting roughly as follows: "Well, open up the magic envelope. OK.

Whew' This is a killer. Write about abortion pro and con for Catholic Weekly. OK boy'

How am I going to handle this?", etc This continues for about an hour until the subject

says something like. "Weil, that's it Good bye, tape recorder (click]." The data of the

study consist of a verbatim transcript of the tape recording (with all the "um's" and

pauses and expletives undeleted) together with the essay and all of the notes the writer

has generated along the way. The transcript is called a protocol. These materials are

then examined in considerable detail for evidence which may reveal something of the

processes by which the writer has created the essay. In general, the data are very rich in

such evidence Subjects typically give many hints about their plans and goals. e g ,

just jot down ideas as they come to me, about strategies for dealing with the audience.

e g. 111 write this as if I were one of them", about criteria for editing and evaluaton, e g

"For 10-year-olds, we better keep thi$ simple", and so on. The analysis of this data is

celled protocol analysis.

2 To understand the writing act, we certainly need to identify the processes

involved -- but this is not enough. We also need to know how these processes are

organized to produce a text. That is, we need to know how the processes are sequenced.

how one process is terminated and how the one which follows is chosen. how errors are

detected. etc. Further, we want to know how simultaneous processes interact When

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writers construct sentences, we want to know how they handle such multiple constraints

as the requirement for correct grammar, appropriate tone, accuracy of meaning, and

smooth transition. In short. we want a model which specifies the processes involved in

writing and accurately describes their organization and interaction.

A model is a metaphor for a process: it's a way to describe something, such as the

composing process, which refuses to sit still for a portrait. People build models in order

to understand how a dynamic system works. and to describe the functional relationships

among its parts. In addition, if a model is to really help us understand more. it should

speak to some of the critical questions in the field of writing and rhetoric. It should help

us see things in a way we didn't see t:.em before

Our second strategic decision was to direct our research toward the construction of

such a model Ideally. the model should be capable of telling us how writers go about

producing a text when they are given a writing assignment. It should tell us what

processes are involved, in what order they occur, and at what points the writer will

experience difficulty. At present, of course. we must be satisfied with a model which is

much less complete that the ideal The ideal defines where we would like to go. but,

alas'. not where we are now.

.3. It is apparent that not all writers write in the same way. For example, some

writers plan their essays from beginning to end before they write a single word of text,

whde others never seem to look beyond the next sentence. Further, some writers seem

to write with their rea:!es constantly in mind. checking frequently to be sure that they

have taken the ieade's knowledge and attitudes into account. Others appear serenely

unaware that an audience could fail to understand what they, in good faith, have intended

to say.

In modeling. we can deal with such differences in either of two ways. We can

choose to construct a model of the "'average" writer and delay until some more propitious

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time the description of differences among writers. This approach has the merit of

simplicity. Further, if things work out well, a model of an average writer might be useful

in characterizing individual differences. Thus, models for individual writers might prove to

be minor variants of the average model. However, thiS approach may have the

disadvantage that averages sometimes suffer from -- the average may be representative

of no one. Thus, we sincerely hope that no one has the average number of children

-- two and a half -- nor would we want anyone to have to eat an average course at

dinner, which might be a compromise between appetizer and dessert such as oysters

with chocolate sauce.

An alternative approach is to construct models which are intended to describe

individuals rather than averages of groups. The disadvantage of this approach is that it

may be expensive In the worst case, each individual may require a separate model. With

better luck. models of individual writers will turn out to be variants of a small number of

model types. The advantage of this approach is that it is more likely than a model of the

average to capture the behavior of actual (rather than idealized) writers

Our third strategic decision, then, was to model the behavior of individual writers

rather than the average behavior of groups of writers.

4. in studying writing, we might well have started with processes which

psychologists and psycholinguistics have already identified as fundamental ones

-- processes such as short-term memory, grammatical categorization, and lexical

marking We might then have attempted to synthesize more complex processes using

these fundamental processes as building blocks, This synthetic or bottom up approach is

a very familiar one in science and has frequently been used with great success.

Geometry and Newtonian physics are perhaps the best known examples

However, research often proceeds in the opposite direction, that is, wholistically, or

from the top down Chemistry provides a good example of top down research. Chemical

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research often starts with a complex compound and then looks for the elementary

components and their relations. The top down approach is the one we have chosen to

apply in our writing research. We have started from the top with the complete writing

act and have attempted to analyze it first into a few relatively complex subprocesses. As

the analysis proceeds, the complex subprocesses are analyzed further into progressively

simpler subprocesses Ultimately, we hope that this top down analysis will make contact

with the fundamental processes which psychologists and psycholinguistics have already

identified. Thus, the top down and bottom up approaches may be viewed as

complementary.

The advantage of the bottom up approach is that it is rooted in fundamental

processes. The advantage of the top down approach is that its results are almost certain

to be relevant to real writing situations.

5. Our final strategic decision was to divide the writing task into three parts (see

Figure 2 1):

1. The task environment -- that ;s, the world outside the writer's skin.

2 The writer's long-term memory; and

3 The writing processes that is, the writer excluding the writer's long-termmemory.

We chose this division because it is an especially convenient one for psychological

ana!ysis and rnode!Iing. Transfers of information between the task environment and the

writer are usud:ly marked clearly by overt acts of reading or writing Further, information

retrie:al from long-term memory is frequently detectable by examining the verbal

protocol Thus, the boundaries we have chosen divide the writing task into parts whose

interactions are relatively easy to observe

Bitzer's analysis of the rhetorical situation (1968) focuses on the importance of the

task environment Lowes' classic study of Coleridge (1927) focuses on the importance of

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the writer's long-term memory. Our own research has focused on the writing processes

1.2. The Task Environment

The task environment includes everything outside the writer's skin that influences

the performance of the task_ It includes the writing assignment, that is, a description of

the topic aria the intended audience, and it may include information relevant to the

writer's motivation. For example, the teac;ier's stern expression when he presents an

assignment may tel: the writer that the assignment must be taken very seriously. Britton

et al. (1975) have emphasized the importance of such motivational factors. Once writing

has begun, the task environment also includes the text which the writer has produced so

far. This text Is a very important part of the task environment because the writer refers

to it repeatedly during the process of composition.

1.3. The Writer's Long-Term Memory

We assume that writers have knowledge about many topics, e.g., auto mechanics

and American history, and about many audiences, e g., children and Catholics, stored in

long-term memory. They may also have generalized writing plans, perhaps in the form of

a story grammar (Rumelhart, 1975) or a formula such as the journalist's questions, ''who,

what, where, when, why?".

2. A Model of the Writing Process

The unique features of the mod& are

1. It identifies not only subprocesses of the composing process, but also theorganization of those subprocesses

2. Minor variations in its simple control structure (shown in Figure 2.6) allow itto describe individual differences in composing styles

Although the model is provisional, it provides a first approximate description of

normal composition that can guide research and afford a valuable starting point in the

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search for more refined models.

2.1. The Writing Process

We propose that writing consists of three major processes: PLANNING,

TRANSLATING, and REVIEWING. The PLANNING process consists of GENERATING,

ORGANIZING, and GOAL-SETTING subprocesses. The function of the PLANNIN-G process is

to take information from the task environment and from long-term memory and to use it

to set goals and to establish a writing plan to guide the production of a text that will

meet those goals. The plan may be drawn in part from long-term memory or may he

formed anew within the PLANNING process The TRANSLATING process acts under the

guidance of the Kitting plan tLi produce language corresponding to information in the

writer's memory. The function of the REVIEWING process. which consists of READING and

EDITING' subprocesses, is to improve the quality of the text produced by the

TRANSLATING process. It ooes this by detecting and correcting weaknesses in the text

with respect to language conventions and accuracy of meaning. and by evaluating the

extent to which the text accomplishes the writer's goals. The structures of the various

processes are shown in Figures 22 through 2.6.

2.2. Planning: Generating

The function of the GENERATING process is to retrieve information relevant to the

vaiting task from long-term memory We assume that this process derives its first

memory probe frorr information about the topic and the audience presented in the task

environment Because each retrieved item is used as the new memory probe. items are

retrieved from memory in associative chains In order to focus search on relevant

material, the retrieval chain is broken whene;:er an item is retrieved that is not useful to

the writing task Search is then restarted with a new memory probe derived from the

task environment or from useful material already retrieved

Some criterion for terminating search chains is essential to prevent the process

from getting lost in associative reverie. The cr terion that we have chosen, i.e., one

irrelevant item, may have to be relaxed somewhat to simulate human performance

accurately. We believe, though, that it won't have to be rehmed much beyond one item.

The most persistent memory searches we have observed in writing protocols never

extended more than three retrievals beyond useful material.

Insert Figures 21 and 2.2 about here

When an 'item is retrieved, the GENERATING process may produce a note.

Characteristically, these notes are single words or sentence fragments, although they may

sometimes be complete sentences The form of these notes will be used later to identify

occurrences of the GENERATING process

2.3. Planning: Organizing

The function of the ORGANIZING process is to select the most useful of the

materials retrieved by the GENERATING process and to organize them into a writing plan.

The plan may be structured either temporally (e g, "First, I'll say A, then B.") or

hierarchically (e g., "Under topic #1, I should discuss A, 8, and C.") or both.

Organizing is done by the elementary operators shown in Figure 23 The first four

of these operators act on single topics, or pairs of topics, e g, the second operator

dec,des which of two topics to discuss fif!t The :ast operator. "Identify a category," may

act to classify a large number of topics that were generated separately under the same

, heading

insert Figure 2.3 about here

Notes generated by the ORGANIZING process often have an oiganizational form

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That is, they are systematically indented, or numbered, or alphabetized, or possibly all of

these. This organizational form will be used later to identify occurrences of the

ORGANIZING process.

2.4. Planning: Goal Setting

Some of the materials retrieved by the GENERATING process are not topics to be

written about but rather are criteria by which to Judge the text. Often such criteria

appear in the protocol when the writer is considering the audience or features of the text.

At such times the writer ma., say, "Better keep it simple," or, 1 need to write a transition

here - The GOAL SETTING process identifies and stores such criteria for later use in

EDITING.

2.4 1. Translating

The function of the TRANSLATING process is to take material from memory under

the guidance of the writing plan and to transform it into acceptable written English

sentences. We assume that material in memory is stored as propositions but not

necessarily as language By a proposition, we understand a structure such as

[(Concept A) (Relation B) (Concept C))Or

[(Concept 0) (Attribute E)], etc.

where concepts, relations, and attributes are memory structures, perhaps complex

networks or images, for which the writer may or nay not have names

To illustrate the operation of the TRANSLATING process (see Figure 2 0), we have

invented a scenario of a student writing an essay on Henri Rousseau.

1. Get next part of writing plan. "I've covered the early years, not' I'vegot to say how he got into painting."

2. Plan next sentence: Retrieve propositionsProposition A: [(Rousseau) (showed) (sole early promise))Proposition B' ((Rousseau) (did) (very little painting until 40)1Sentence plan: (Pi.:position A) but (Proposition B)

13....111.

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3. Express next proposition part: "Rousseau ... Rousseau, what? Rousseaudisplayed ... Although Rousseau displayed some early prt - ise ..., etc.'

Insert Figure 2.4 about here

Writing done during the TRANSLATING process shows two features:

1. Characteristically, it is in the form of complete sentences, and

2. It is often associated with a protocol segment that contains an interrogativereflecting search for the next sentence part, e.g., "Rousseau did what ?" or,"How do I want to put this?"

These features will be used later to identify occurrences of the TRANSLATING

process.

2.4.2. Reviewing

The function of the reviewing process is to improve the quality of the written text.

It consists, as Figure 2.5 shows, of two subprocesses: READING and EDITING.


Reviewing: Edit;ng. The EDITING process examines any material that the writer

puts into words, whether by reading, writing, or speaking. Its purpose is to detect and

correct violations in writing conventions and inaccuracies of meaning and to evaluate

materials with respect to the writing goals. These evaluations may be reflected in

4_,,Jestions such as. "Will this argument be convincing?" and. "'Jaye I covered all parts of

the plan?"

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We assume that the EDITING process has the form of a production system.1 The

conditions of the productions have two parts. The first part specifies the kind of

language to which the editing production applies, e.g formal sentences, notes, etc. The

second is a fault detector for such problems as grammatical errors, incorrect words, and

missing context. When the conditions of a production are met, e.g., a grammatical error

is found in a formal sentence, the action that is triggered is a procedure for fixing the

fault.

Consider the following production:

[(formal sentence) (first letter of sentence lower case)> change first letter to upper case]

If the writer is producing formal sentences, this production will detect and correct errors

in initial capitalization. However, if the writer is only producing notes, the conditions of

the production will not be met and capitalization will be ignored.

Although the action in the preceding production is simple, in some cases the action

may invoke the whole writing process recursively. For example, in one writing protocol,

the w; tees first draft contained the first sentence of tt final draft immediately followed

1A production system is an ordered sequence of condition-action rules The left sideof each rule shows the condition or stimulus, and the right side shows the action to betaken if the condition is met The conditions are tested in order, starting with the firstrule The order of the productions is important Consider the production system forputting a horse in a barn

Conditions(horse out of barn) and(barn door closed)

(horse Out of barn)(barn door open)

Actions--> (open barn door)

--> (put horse in barn)--> (close barn door)

Changing the order of these productions could have very serious consequences for thehorse!

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by the seventh sentence ot.the final draft. In editing the first draft, the writer recognized

that the reader would not have sufficient context to understand the relation between

these two sentences. To correct this fault, the writer constructed a small explanatory

essay to insert between the sentences. Thus, in this case, the fixing procedure invoked

the whole writing process.

We assume that the EDITING process is triggere(1 automatically whenever ther

conditions of an editing production are satisfied and that it will interrupt any other

ongoing process


We distinguish between REVIEWING and EDITING as two distinct modes of behavior.

On the one hand, EDITING is triggered automatically and mai occur in brief episodes

interrupting other processes REVIEWING, on the other hand, is not a spur-,f-the-

moment activity but rather one in which the writer decides to devote a period of time to

systematic examination and improvement of the text. It occurs typically when the writer

has finished a translation process rather than as an interruption to that process

2.4.3. The Monitor

The relations among the processes are defined by the simple production system

shown in Figure 27. The structure of the monitor was chosen to reflect three

observations about composition processes

Insert Figure 27 about here

1. The EDITING and GENERATING processes may interrupt other processes.Thus. the first two production rules triggering EDITING and GENERATINGprocesses take priority over goal setting rules

2 The writer's intuitions and the persistence of his or her actions suggest that

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writing processes are controlled by goals. Thus, if writers report that they aretrying to organize material, they will persistently return to ORGANIZINGprocesses even when those processes are interrupted by EDITING andGENERATING (productions 3 through 6 define the writer's goals).

3. Individual differences In goal setting reflect important individual differences inwriting style. Figure 2.8 shows four alternat'ae configurations for the goalsetting productions. Each configuration corresponds to a characteristicallydifferent way of producing an essay. Configuration 1, for example,corresponds to a style in which the writer tries to produce a perfect firstsentence and then to follow the perfect first sentence with a perfect secondsentence and so on. The work of planning, translating, and reviewing eachsentence is completed before the writer proceeds to the next sentence. WithConfiguration 2, thoughts are written down as they occur to the writer and hereviews them ester. With Configuration 3, the writer tries to generate aperfect first draft. Configuration 4 yields a breadth-tirst composing process.A draft is planned and then written out in fun before any review takes place.Lowenthal and Wason (1977) have described writing styles among academics

:that correspond to Configurations 3 and 4.

Insert Figure 2 8 about here

Rules 7 through 10 in Figure 2 7 have the effect of executing the current goal when

the goal activity is not being interrupted by rule 1 or 'tile 2.

As a final observation about the model, notice that the GENERATING process

operates differently when the goal is GENERATING than when it is not. When the goal is

GENERATING, the GENERATING process is persistent. That is, each attempt to generate is

followed by another attempt to generate. When the goat is not GENERATING, each

attempt to generate is followed by a return to the process specified by the current goal

(the one which GENERATING interrupted).

2.5, Testing the Model

We compare our model with a writing protocol in which the writer gave especially

clear indications of ongoing writing processes and of the transitions between processes

(The writer's style suggests that he sets his goals in the same way as the monitor with

Configuration 4 see cigure 2.8) This relatively unambiguous protocol provides a

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rigorous test of the model's adequacy.

The protocol consisted of 14 pages of verbal transcript (the thinking aloud part of

the protocol), five pages of notes, and a page of completed essay. We divided the verbal

transcript into a sequence of segment), each containing a simple comment or statement.

We have analyzed the first 458 segments of the transcript, or about half of it.

The segments are of three general types:

1. Metacomments -- comments that writers make about the writing processitself, e.g.. "I'll just make a list of topics now," "I'm going to write out a draft,""Better go back and read it over,"

2. Task-oriented or "content" statements--statements that reflect theapplication of writing processes to the current task. e.g.. 'That's not the rightword" reflects an editing process. "I'll use that topic last" reflects an

organizing process, etc.

3 Interjectionssuch as "Ok, "Well, let's see." all righ:,""urnm,"ah,- etc

Consider tie sequences of segments. We 1111'11 just make a list of topics now./Energy

conserveion,/pollutionfunempinyment. The first segment is an interjection; the second, a

metacomment. and the rest are task-oriented statements. (Interjections were not analyzed

in this study.)

Writing protocols are complex, and writers are often incomplete or ambiguous when

they describe what they are doing. As a result, in analyzing a protocol. we frequently

have to make judgments about the writer's meaning. The presence of such judgments

may lead one to question the objectivity of the analyses Because we are testing our

model by comparing it to a protocol, we have to be especia:ly careful to establish the

objectivity of our analysis. To do this, we have taken the following steps

1. Whenever objective evidence was available, we used it. Thus, reading andwriting processes were identified by matching the verbal protocol word forword with the writer's notes and text (the objective evidence).

2. Whenever possible, processes were identified by using converging lines ofevidence. e.g.., the form of the written material on the one hand. and thewriter's comments about what he is doing on the other.

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3. The mcst important analyses were replicated by independent judges.

2.6. Protocol Sections

The writer's metacomments suggest that the protocol can be divided quite cleanly

into three sections. In the first section, including segments 1 through 116, tne writer's

goal is to generate; in the second, including segments 117 through 270, it is to organize,

and in the third, including segments 271 through 458, it is to translate. Here are the

metacomments that led us to this conclusion:

Segment 2: "And what I'll do now is to simply jot down random thoughts.."

Segment 5: 'Topics as they occur randomly are.."

Segment 48: "Organizing nothing as yet."

Segment 69. "Other things to think about in this random search are

Segment 117: Now I think it's time to go back and read over the material

and elaborate on its organization."

Segment 161: "Now this isn't the overall organization. This is Just

the organization of a subpart.-

Segment 237: "There's an organization.-

Segment 239: "Let's try and write something."

Segment 243: "Oh, no We need more organizing

Segment 269: "I can imagine the possibility of an alternate plan..."

Segment 271: "But let's build on this plan and see what happens with it."

If these assumptions about goals are correct. it follows from the model that the

most frequent process in the first section will be GENERATING interrrupted occasionally

by EDITING, in the second, ORGANIZING interrupted by GENERATING and EDITING, and in

the third, TRANSLATING interrupted by GENERATING and EDITING. Further. we can make

three predictions about the protocol:

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1. The form of the written material should vary from section to sectioncorresponding to changes in process from section to section. Thus, in thefirst section, we expect the generating process to produce many single worn 3,detached phrases, and incomplete sentences. In the second section, ..,3expect the organizing process to produce material that is systematicallyindented, alphabetized, or numbered. In the third section, we expect thetranslating process to produce many complete sentences and some materialassociated in the verbal protocol with interrogatives suggesting search forsentence continuation.

2. The content statements in the protocol should relect the distribution ofprocesses just predicted, and

3. The generating process should be more persistent in section 1 than insections 2 and 3.

2.7. HYPOTHESIS 1: The Form of the Written Materials

To test the first hypothesis, we wanted to determine if items written during the first

section had a form consistent with the GENERATING process; items written during the

second section, with the ORGANIZING process, and the items written during the third

section, with the 1RANSLATING process. For this purpose we identified all of the items

written in the three protocol sections : 26 in the first section; 24 in the second; and 12 in

the third. An item was a word, phrase, or sentence that was identifiable in the verbal

protocol as being written during a single segment or several contiguous segments it

was, in effect, a short burst of writing.

Three raters were given the written material and verbal protocol and were asked

indepe-Aently to make the following judgments about each written item

1. Does it have good form. i e . is it a complete. grammatical sentence,

2 Is it part of a systernaticcIly indented, alphabetized, or numbered structure, i e,does it appear to be part of an 'utline or structured plan of some sort?

3. Is it associated in the verbal protocol with an interrogative suggesting searchfor sentence completion?

Table 21 shows that there was excellent agreement among the raters in making

these judgments. For each of the properties, Table 2 2 shows the proportion of items

17

written during each section that were judged to have that property. An item was scored

as having a property if two or more of the judges agreed that it did.

Insert Tables 2.1 and 2.2 about here

Items written during section 1 sometimes had good form but most usually had none

of the three properties. Items written during section 2 typically showed the second

property (indentation, etc.) but neither of the other properties. Two-thirds of the items

written during section 3 were of good form and many were associated in the protocol

with interrogatives. No items written in any other section were associated with an

interrogative. These results are quite consistent with the view that GENERATING is the

dominant process in section 1. ORGANIZING in section 2, and TRANSLATING in section 3,

and thus provide strong support for Hypothesis 1.

2.8. HYPOTHESIS 2: Classifying "Content" Statements

Our second hypothesis is that the content statements in the protocol will reflect

differences in distribution of processes in the three protocol sections. As with our first

hypothesis, we are looking for evidence that the writing processes we have postulated

turn up where they ought to, e g., GENERATING should appear prominently when the

writer says that his goal is to generate ideas, etc. !n addition, we are looking for

evidence that the EDITING ,..nd GENERATING processes interrupt the other processes as

we have postulated Again, the expected distribution of writing processes is. in the first

section, GENERATING interrupted by EDITING. in the second. ORGANIZING interrupted by

EDITING and GENERATING. and in the third. TRANSLATING interrupted by EDITING and

GENERATING

To test this hypothesis. each of the authors independently classified each segment

in two ways.

18

In classification 1, eachIstegment was judged as belonging to one of the following

four categories: (a) interjectigns, (b) metacomments; (c) content statements; and (d) a/

combination of metacomments and content statements.

In classification 2, the authors made judgments as to which of the writing processes

was most likely to have given rise to the segment. Four alternative writing processes

were considered: GENERATING, ORGANIZING, TRANSLATING. and EDITING.

Because the protocol sections were identified by examining the writer's

metacomments, we wanted to test Hypothesis 2 using only segments that were purely

content statements with no component of metacomment. Therefore, in the following

analysis, we have considered only those segments that both authors classified as pure

content statements. Out of a total of 458 segments, 170 were identified °s pure content

statements, approximately 130 as interjections, 18 previously irk tified as "reads* were

not judged. and the remainder were judged by one author or the other as being

metacomments in part or whole.

The authors agreed in attributing writing processes in 144 or 84.7% of the 170

content statements. Table 2.3 shows that, despite some differences, the authors agree

that the content statements in section 1 can be attributed mostly to GENERATING; in

section 2, to ORGANIZING: and in section 3, to TRANSLATING. They also agree that

approximately 10 to 15% of the segments in each section can be attributed to EDITING

and that approximately 10 to 15% of segments in sections 2 and 3 can be attributed to

GENERATING The most important disagreement is that one author attributes some

segments in sections 1 and 2 to TRANSLATING whereas the other does not

Insert Table 2 3 about here

Figure 2 9, which shows the processes author 2 attributed to the sequence of

metacomments and content statements, illustrates two features of the protocol:

19

1. Interruptions of other processes by EDITING and GENERATING are frequentand wiltiely distributed.

2. Even though in segment 117, the writer announced, Now it's time to go backand read over the material and elaborate on its organization," apparently hedoesn't do very much organizing until segment 153. The reason for this isthat the writer is indeed reading (10 "reads' occurred in this interval), and thereading triggered some GENERATING and EDITING interrupts.

Because we made the judgments of process in the context of the whole protocol,

one must be concerned that this context could have influenced our judgment. For

example,, we might have attributed a segment to GENERATING rather than to

TRANSLATING if the segment occurred early in the protocol.

To determine if consistent judgments of process could be made without context, we

conducted the following study. We selected 41 content statements from the protocol and

typed them on cards. The cards were then shuffled and presented for judgment

independently to two coders (not the authors). Coder 1 agreed with one of us in 67% of

judgments and Coder 2, in 77% of judgments. Most of the disagreements (16 out of 22)

involved judgments of EDITING. Many segments that the author attributed to EDITING the

coders attributed to GENERATING. EDITING may be especially difficult to identify out of

context because "edits" often present a comment on the previous segment or represent a

change in a previous segment It is difficult, for example, to see that segment 87, "I

guess all elements are tow lever indicates editing for redundancy unless one also sees

segment 86, "even low level elements of writing " If we consider only segments that the

author attributed to GENERATING ORGANIZING, or TRANSLATING, we find that both

coders agree with the author in 86% of cases. These high levels of agreement are very

encouraging and suggest that even if judgments were made without context, our

conclusions concerning Hypothesis 2 would be substantially the same Overall, then, our

results strongly support Hypothesis 2

20


2.9. HYPOTHESIS 3: Measuring Retrieval Chains

Our third hypothesis is that the GENERATING process will be more persistent during

section 1 of the protocol, when the goal is to generate, than during sections 2 and 3,

when it is not. To test this hypothesis, one of the authors identified all of the content

ideas generated during the protocol. (A single idea might be the topic of several protocol

segments but was nonetheless counted as one idea) A total of 48 separate ideas was

identified. The two authors then independently judged whether each idea rad been cued

by the previous idea or not. Because the authors' judgments agreed in 96% of cases, we

simply present the average of their results

In section 1, 32 ideas occurred in chains of average length 6.4, whereas in sections

2 and 3, 16 ideas occurred in chains of average length 2.0. As the model predicted, the

GENERATING process was much more persistent during the first section of the protocol

than during the second two. The fact that the average chain length in sections 2 and 3

was two rather than one as the model requires suggests that our criteria for terminating

search should be relaxed a bit.

The sequence in which ideas were retrieved in section 1 was strongly determined

by associative connections to appear in the final essay We might expect this unless, of

course, an active ORGANIZING process intervenes between GENERATING and

TRANSLATING as the mode! postulates.

Figure 2.10 shows the writer's outline for the essay as a structure of ideas in tree

form The numbers in the figure indicate the order in which the ideas were generated

Clearly, the retrieval order is very different from the outline order

24

-.

21


2.10. Conclusions filWe believe that the evidence provides very encouraging support for our model. All

three of the model's predictions were strongly confirmed. We should note, however, that

although these results are encouraging, they are quite limited in scope. First, although

the model was derived through informal analysis of many protocols, it has been tested

formally with only one protocol. Second, although the model is quite complex, only a few

of its properties have been tested. We have tested some properties of the major writing

processes, but we have not, for example, tested the model's predictions about individual

differences nor about the structure of the editing processes We plan to conduct much

more extensive testing of the model in the near future.

Whether or not it is supported by the data, one may still ask, is there really

anything new about the model? Haven't English teachers been talking about processes

such as planning, organizing, and editing for a long time?" Indeed English teachers have

been talking about such processes for a long time. Nonetheless, there is a great deal

that is new about the model. First, the model is rather speeVic about the nature of the..._ .

---.......-cindividual processes (see Figures 22 2.6). Second, and mbre important, the model\\specifies the organization of these processes In particular, it specifies an organization

that is goal directed and recursive, that allows for process interrupts, and that can

account for individual differences.

We should caution the reader not to interpret our model as a stage model. We are

not saying that writing proceeds in order through successive stages of PLANNING,

TRANSLATING, and REVIEWING. It may do so, and, indeed, in the part of the protocol

examined in this paper, writing did proceed generally in successive stages. However, this

25

4

22

is not the only sort of writing behavior we have cbserved, nor is it the only sort allowed

by the model. The model is recursive and allows for a complex intermixing of stages. As

we noted previously, the whole writing process, including PLANNING. TRANSLATING, and

REVIEWING, may appear as a part of an EDITING subprocess. Because EDITING can

interrupt any other process, these processes can appear within any other process.

Further, we should note that we do not intend to imply that all writers use all of the

processes we have described. Our model is a model of competent writers. Some

writers, though, perhaps to their disadvantage, may fail to use some of the processes.

We have, for example, observed a writer who failed to organize. This writer, however,

could not be viewed as competent

We believe that our model, if it is approximately correct, can serve as a guide to the

diagnosis of writing difficulties. We hope that, whether it is right or wrong, it can serve

as "a target to shoot at." and hence a guide to further research on writing.

3. The Dynamics of Composing

3.1. Introduction

In this section we attempt to use our proposed model of the writing process to

describe writers in action In other words, we would like to account, from the writer's

point of view, for the dy_narnics of composing. We make two major points. The first is

that the act of writing is best described as the act of juggling a number of simultaneous

constraints This is in contrast to seeing it as a series of discrete stages or steps that

add up to a finished product Second, we suggest that one of the most effective

strategies for handling this large number of constraints is Planning. Plans allow writers

to reduce "cognitive strain," that is, to reduce the number of demands being made on

conscious attention. (They also create a nested set of goals that allow a number of

constraints to be satisfied at once.)

23

In general, the constraints an adult writer must shoulder seem to fall into three

major groups of increasing inclusiveness: the second is the more inclusive linguistic

conventions of written texts; and the third is the encompassing constraints of the

rhetorical problem itself. Writing is like trying to work within government regulations

from various agencies: Whatever the writer chooses to say must, in principle, eventually

conform to all of the constraints imposed from all of these areas. Let us look at each of

these kinds of constraints in more detail.

3.2. Knowledge

Generally speaking. Knowledge is a resource, not a constraint. However, it becomes

a constraint on the process when it in not in an acceptable form. In general, expository

writing calls for relatively orpnized. conceptually integrated knowledge. When

confronts n:; r. new or a complex issue, writers must often move from a rich array of

unorganized, perhaps even contradictory percentions, memories, and propositions to an

integrated notion of just what it is they think about the topic. Some writers obviously go

much further down this road than others, but much of the work of writing can be the task

of transforming incoherent thought and loosely related pockets of information into a

highly conceptualized and precisely related knowledge network.

In the following protocol, we se a subject responding to the demand for sufficiently

integrated knowledge. She has probably never had to talk, much less write, about her

subject before. so her writing process is strongly constra.ned by the need to formulate

just what it is sne thinks or knows. We see her retrie.fing information from memory,

drawing inferences, and relating her various ideas We have deleted portions of the

protocol that are irelevant to this discussion, they will be shown later. There are a

number of important tnings to notice here. .1f w try to .diagram the writer's developing

knowledge structure as a map, we find that the . ipography keeps changing. The writer

doesn't start with a well-formed thesis that she can just develop. Instead. she must

27

24

juggle her ideas around trying to decide just how they are related. "Grades" is an

interesting floater. Notice hnw it moves about on her knowledge map.

The arrows in Figure 3.2 indicate 3 general causal relationship between two ideas.

If that relationship become^ further specified, the line then receives a label as in episode

3. Initially both Grades and Prec_suia are linked independently to Motivation (lines 1-4 in

the protocol). Then Grades become identified with Pressure and subordinated to a new

notion, Personal Satisfaction. In episode 3, line 9 in the protocol, Personal Satisfaction is

reasserted as a cause of Motivation and the relationship between the two is further

defined with the label major, In episodes 4 and 5, lines 15-28 in the protocol, the writer

sets up a number of trial relationships in which Grades are still a subordinate element.

When, however, we skip to the final draft, we find a knowledge map in which Grades and

Personal Satisfaction have come to stand as independent parallel causes and each

relationship has been further specified by the labels major, and initial.

Insert Figures 3 1 and 3.2 about here

Retrieving knowledge and creating an adequate conceptual structure of "what you

think" can be a demanding task. Sir Phillip Sidney's poetic advice to A trophel, "Look into

they heart and write: is often a useful heuristic, but it doesn't guarantee that you will

find a ready-made conceptual structure there.

3 3 Written Speech

If we refer to the Wendy protocol at line 11 in Figure 3.3, we can see her trying to

, accommodate a second, even more demanding constraint. In addition to clarifying what

she thinks, she is now trying to express that knowledge map within the linguistic and

discourse conventions of written prose. Notice too how quickly she has jumped to the

added task of producing text. nine lines of analysis and she is ready to set it in type.

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25


There are many ways in which language, which enables us to express complex

thought, also constrains our attempt to do it. For the inexperienced or remedial writer,

the rules of grammar and conventions of usage and syntax may make an enormous

demand on time and attention. But even the more experienced writer must encounter the

inevitable truculence of language itself, which seems to resist our attempts to form a set

of continuous sentences with forward and backward reference. A sentence that is

grammatically acceptable may twist the meaning, repeat a word too soon, or have terrible

rhythm. In generating a given sentence. the writer needs to meet all of these constraints

more or less at once

The following example illustrates the difference bet% een knowing something and

trying to turn that knowledge into a piece of writing. Wendy has established a knowledge

map in which Motivation and Grades are related in three distinct ways. She is now trying

to turn that set of thoughts into an acceptable sentence. Where we enter the protocol,

she is working on the sentences that will become sentences 2, 4, and 6 in the final text.

The excerpts shown in Figure 3.4. from Wendy's final essay and from the protocol.

illustrate two interesting points:

1. Complex thoughts don't automatically flower into appropriately parallelcomplex sentences. Although Moliere's Bourgeois Gentleman was surprised todiscover that he had been speaking *prose" all his life, doing so is no meantask The success that sentence-combining exercises claim for improvingoverall writing skill (O'Hare, 1973) is probably due to their ability to reduce theeffect of this linguistic constraint. By making sentence production processessomewhat more automatic, the writer has time to concentrate on otherimportant constraints.

2 In addition to producing a verbal rendition of thought, our writer must alsowork within the conventions of written speech, particularly those conventionsthat distinguish oral speech from writing and make writing a specialized formof discourse. Even from this brief protocol passage, we can infer that the

26

writer probably has a set of rules or adages about paper writing that say:

* Be specific.

* Repeat ideas for emphasis.

* Refer back for coherence.

* Don't repeat words/phrases in close proximity.

* Use "correct" (7) wording.


4. Cognition of Discovery

Even though the teacher gives several students the same assignment, The writers

themselves create the problem they solve. Because people only solve the problems they

give themselves, the act of representing the problem has a dramatic impact on

performance. People simply rewrite an assignment or a situation to make it

commensurate with their own skills, habits, or fears (Britton et, al., 1978). Although

writing texts generally ignore this part of the writing process, (Larson, 1978) our work

suggests that it may be one of the most critical steps the average writer takes.

The first part of this section, then, will describe our method for studying the

cognitive .rocess by which people represent the rhetorical problem. Then we will

present a model of the rehetorical problem itself. that is, a description of the major

elements writers could consider in building such an image Finally, we will use this

model of the possible as a basis for comparing what good and poor writers actually do.

30

27

4.1. Studying Cognitive Processes

The research question we posed for ourselves was this: if discovery is an act of

making meaning, not finding it, in response to a self-defined problem or goal, how does

this problem get defined? Specifically, we wanted to answer three questions:

1. What aspects of a rhetorical problem do people actively represent tothemselves? For example, do writers actually spend much time analyzing theiraudience, and if so, how do they do it?

2. If writers do spend time developing a full representation of their problem,does it help them generate new ideas?

3. And finally, are there any significant differences in the way good and poorwriters go about this task?

In order to describe the problem definition process itself, we collected thinking-aloud

protocols from both expert and novice writers A protocol is a detailed record of a

subject's behavior. Our protocols include a transcript of a tape recording rnsde by writers

instructed to verbalize their thinking process as they write, as well as all written material

the writer produced A typical protocol from a one-hour session will include four to five

pages of notes and writing and 15 pages of typed transcript. The novice writers were

college students who had gone to the Communication Skills Center for general writing

problems such as coherence and organization. The expert writers were teachers of

writing and meiotic who had received year-long NEH fellowships to study writing. Each

writer was given the followihg problem "write about your job for the readers of

Se.£nteeri magazine, 13-14 year-old girls," and was asked to compose out loud into a

tape recorder as he or she worked. They were told to verbalize everything that went

through their minds, including stray thoughts and crazy ideas, but not to try to analyze

their thought process, just to express it.

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4.2. A Model of the Rhetorical Problem

From these protocols, we pulled together a composite picture or model of the

rhetorical problem itself. This composite is shown in Figure 4.1, with examples drawn

from our writers' protocols. It is based on what the group of writers did and shows the

basic elements of a writing problem which a given writer could, active;u consider in the

process of composing, if he or she chose to. For example, the writer in the following

excerpt is actively creating an image of himself or his persona, an image of what effect

he might have on his reader, and an initial representation of a meaning or idea he might

choose to develop, as the words in brackets indicate.

Ah, in fact, that might be a useful thing to focus on, how a professor differsfrom...how a teacher differs from a professor, (meaning), and I see myself as ateacher, (persona), that might help them, my audience, to reconsider their notionof what an English teacher does. (effect on audience)


Taken as a whole, the rhetorical problem breaks into two major units. The first is

the rhetorical situation This situation, which is the writer's given, includes the audience

and assignment The second unit is the set of goals the writer himself creates. The four

dominant kinds of goals we observed involved affecting the reader, creating a persona, or

voice, building a meaning, and producing a formal text.

4.3. Oifferencees Among Writers

This six-part model of the rhetorical problem attempts to describe the major kinds

of givens and goals writers could represent to themselves as they compose As a model

for comparison it allowed us to see patterns in what Our good and poor writers actually

did The differences, which were striking, were these'

1. Good writers respond to all aspects of the rhetorical problem. As they compose

29

they build a unique representation not only of their audience and assignment, but also of

their goals involving the audience, their own persona, and the text. By contrast, the

problem representations of the poor writers were concerned primarily with the features

and conventions of a written text, such as number of pages or magazine format. For

example, Figure 4.2 shows a vivid contrast between an expert and novice when we

compare the way two writers represented their rhetorical problem in the first 60 lines of

a protocol. The numbers are based on categorizing pharses and sentences within the

protocol.


As you can see. the expert made reference to his audience or assignment 18 times

in the first seven to eight minuses of composing. whereas the novice considered the

rhetorical situation less than half that often. The most striking difference of course, is in

their tendency to represent or create goals for dealing with the audience. Finally, the

column marked "Total" shows our expert writer simply spending more time than the

novice in thinking about and commenting on the rhetorical problem, as opposed to

spending that time generating text

2. In building their problem representation. good writers create a particularly rich

network of goals for affecting their reader Furthermore, these goals, based on affecting

%

a reader, also he!ped the writer generate new ideas In an eerier study we discovered

that our experienced writers fa different group this tape) generated up to 60 per cent of

their new ideas in response to the larger rhetorical problem (that is. in response to the

assignment, their audience, or their own goals) Only 30 per cent were in response to the

topic alone For example, a writer would say "Ill want an introduction that pulls you in,"

instead of merely reciting facts about the topic, such as As an engineer the first thing to

do is .." In the poor writers the results were almost reversed. 70 per cent of their new

30

ideas ?ivere statements about the topic alone without concern for the larger rhetorical

probltm (Flower and Hayes, 1979). All of this suggests that setting up goals to affect a

reader is not only a reasonable act, but a powerful strategy for generating new ideas and

exploring even a topic as personal as "my job."

As you might easily predict, plans for affecting a reader also give the final paper a

more effective rhetorical focus. For example, one of the novice writers, whose only goals

for affecting the audience were to "explain (his) job simply so it would appeal to a broad

range of intellect," ended up writing a detailed technical analysis of steam turbulence in

an electrical generator. The topic was of considerable importance to him as a future

research -ngineer, but hardly well focused for the readers of Seventeen.

3. Good writers represent the problem not only in more breadth, but in depth. As

they write, they continue to develop their image of the reader, the situation, and their

own goals with increasing detail and specificies. We saw this in the writer who came

back to revise and elaborate her image of her fashion-consuming reader. By contrast,

poor writers often remain throughout the entire composing period with the flat,

undeveloped, conventional representation of the problem with which they started

The main conclusion of our study is this: good writers are simply solving a

different problem than poor writers Given the fluency we can expect from native

speakers, this raises an important question Would the performance of poor writers

change if they too had a richer sense of what they were trying to do as they wrote, or if

the had more of the goals for affecting the reader which were so stimulating to the

good writers? People only solve the problems they represent to themselves. Our guess

is that the poor writers we studied possess verbal and rhetorical skills which they fail to

use because of their underdeveloped image of their rhetorical problem. Because they

have narrowed a rhetorical act to a paper-writing problem, their representation of the

problem doesn't call on abilities they may well have.

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31

5. A Taxonomy of Writing Plans

We know that writers generate an enormous number and variety of plans as they

compose; the problem is how to categorize these plans in a useful way. Our hypothesis

is that writers draw on three major kinds of plans which are hierarchically related to one

another.

Si. Plans To Do

To begin with, writers generate plans for dealing with their rhetorical problem.

These rhetorical plans are called plans To Do something in or by language. These are

essentially plans for performing a speech act--for responding in some way to that

rhetorical problem. which includes the writer, the reader, and a purpose. A plan To Do

something in writing might be as unique and specific as "Write a note for the icebox door

to keep the family our of the plums Use a stern parental voice that begins with firm

reasonableness and ends with a veiled threat' At the Other extreme a rhetorical plan

could be as conventional and limited as "write another essay for Freshman Compositions

class." As you might expect when writers fail to plan or depend on limited, stereotypic

plans, they are likely to spend very little time actively considering audience or purpose

when they write They are more likely to produce "Writer-Based prose," which takes on

the structure of the ihriter's own thought process and the style of an interior monologue

(Flower, 1979).

A rhetoric& plan To Do something can not only improve the quality of a paper. it

can also make it easier to write When people treat writing as a speech act, they are

more likely to draw on many of the well-learned strategies adults use everyday for

arguing, explaining, or describing, but which many seem to ignore when they are writing

for a class A rhetorical plan offers the writer a pole star for the choppy sea of trying to

compose

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32

5.2, Plans To Say

In order to carry out a plan To Do something, writers often generate two kinds of

subplans. The first of these is the familiar and rudimentary plan that all schoolchildren

have had drilled into them in the form of outlining: a plan for what you want To Say A

plan To Say something is essentially a content plan--a simplified or abstract version of

the information you want to convey. It can take a variety of forms, ranging from

scribbled notes and sketches on an envelope to an impressive sentence outline complete

with Roman numerals and two subpoints under every point. A plan To Say is essentially

a scale model of the final product. Perhaps that is why it has been so widely and

rigorously taught, often to the exclusion of any other kind of planning.

5.3. Composing Plans

There is, howe4er, another kind of planning writers do that is based not on the

product of writing, but on the process. This third kind of plan we call a Composing Plan.

Some Composing Plans help people generate knowledge. In classical rhetoric,

such formali2ed plans go under the name of invention. One can choose from highly

swstematic and analytical plans, such as the particle. wave, field analysis of tagmemics, to

Aristotle's topics or Gordon's synthetics. Or one could choose from more enigmatic and

inspirational plans, such as Sheridan Baker's (1969) advice on 'picking an argument' or

the meditation techniques used in Pre-Writing. on down to the time honored methods of

poetic inspiration look into your heart and write." If you wish your students to have

mo:e self conscious control over the process of generating ideas, there are many ways

to teach it.

The category of Composing Plans also includes a large set of ad hoc plans people

use to guide themselves through the process of writing For example, when the w. r in

the Wendy protocol ran into trouble, she told herself to "write a bunch of ideas down and

connect them later.' Some of our subjects appear to be at the mercy of inspiration as

33

they compose, or slaves to their own growing text. Others are able not only to monitor

their composing process, but to choose alternative ways to proceed. At the base of our

work with heuristic strategies for writers (Flower and Hayes, 1977) is an attempt to learn

more about these unexplored alternative strategies within the art of composing itself.

Let us close with an excerpt from a protocol that illustrates a writer working under

a top-level plan To Do something, which in turn creates a nested set of goals and

subgoals. As the protocol develops, we see how the writer's forward progress is the

result of a recursive, nonlinear process guided by a variety of plans. As an illuminating

contrast to this Subject, we studied another writer whom we shall call "Free write." As he

composed, Freewrite's top-level plan appeared to be 'Write whatever comes to mind"

His guiding plan was essentially a plan To Say, with only a rudimentary set of composing

rules tacked on (e.g, use correct grammar, use correct spelling if you know it, and

paragraph occasionally) His protocol showed almost no discernible attention given to

audience or purpose, and the final product, as you might guess, read rather like a

audience or purpose, and the final product, as you might guess, read rather like a

transcript of free association, even though the writer considered it quite adequate.


We return then to the writer working under a top-level plan To Do This schematic

version of a protocol covers the beginning of the composing session The plans To Do

and To Compose are generally comments the ,vriter makes to himse'f, whereas the plans

To Say are frequently notes jotted on paper Notice how the first three moves essentially

define the rhetorical problem.

By move 4. the writer has sketched out the rhetorical problem (his purpose,audience, and his own role) and set up a composing plan (just jot things down).When he begins to explore his knowledge at move 4, it is under thesimultaneous control of these two plans

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34

Move 5, a decision to keep on generating ideas, is a reaffirmation anddevelopment of the initial composing plan in Move 2.

By move 7, the information the writer has generated leads him to form a newplan that is both a Composing plan for the final paper and a plan To Dosomething--to make a point for the reader.

Move 9 is probably the most illuminating point of the protocol because thewriter encounters a mismatch between his Knowledge (things he could sayabout Memory Is) and his goal vis-a-vis the reader. His action demonstratesthe distinction between Knowledge and Goals in writing. His high-level plan ToDo, based on his purpose and reader, lets him consider two subplans (make thesubject itself important or focus on its underlying principle) and in turn twopockets of knowledge. In the process of working by plan our writer considerstwo radically different things he could say. Clearly his writing process is notsimply the straightforward act of expressing what he knows. instead it is ahierarchically organized, recursive process in which knowledge and text aregenerated under the direction of both the rhetorical plan To Do something and aComposing plan for how to do it in writing.

This fragment of protocol was the beginning of the Subject's writing session. At

the end of the session. 40 minutes later, there was an unexpected code The writer

discovered that his initial objective of "justifying Memory r hl been entirely forgotten in,..

the course of composing a different line of argument. He now sees that Memory I (and

the ideas generated in our excerpt) could be an example in this larger argument. In the

following brief section, he sets up a new plan (which is both a rhetorical and a

composing plan) and begins to compose text.

This excerpt illustrates what is probably one of the critical differences we have seen

between the processes of good and weak writers. Weak writers in this situation *Mould

probably cont,nue to crunch out text under the direction of a plaii To Say what they,knew

or a plan To Compose their information into "acceptable" text. Good writers, by contrast,

not only make initial high-level plans To Do something, but continue to return to and

develop those plans as they write


35

6. The Pregnant Pause

An important aspect of most writers composing plans is the heuristic of

fractionation (Hayes. 1981). Fractionation is the process of breaking a problem into parts

and solving it by solving its component parts. the power of this heuristic for reducing the

impact of problem constraints and memory limitations is widely recognized. The writer's

use of fractionation to solve writing problems is revealed in the structure of the thinking

aloud protocols. Typically, writing protocols are divided into easily perceived segments or

"composing episodes" which are with few exceptions devoted to the statement and

solution of a relatively well defined part of the total writing problem.

Composing episodes are units in thi process of the writer, rather than his or her

written rolt,_.ict. We initially noticed that writers appeared to work in units of

concentration or periods of sustained focus, and, more importantly, found trial'

boundaries between these composing episodes could be agreed upon by independent

readers. In the protocols of three subjects analyzed in detail (the tape of one expert

writer was no longer available) these episodes ranged in length from 1 to 33 tines of

typescript, lasting from 7 seconds to 12 minutes, with an average length of 1 minute 45

seconds and an average of 10 clauses per episode (see Table 6 1).

Insert Table 6 1 about here

in our analysis we will occEsionally separate episodes into "major episode . which

are clearly autonomous episodes with strong boundaries, and "minor episod which

have weaker boundaries or stronger connections to adjacent episodes. ets of these

minor episodes typically cluster together to form a functional unit--they work as sub-

episodes within the more clearly bounded unit of a major episode The following example

will clarify this distinction. It comes from the very beginning of an expert protocol and

shows two brief major episodes (74 and 47 seconds) and the beginning of one longer

Ci

36

major episode (13 minute) composed of three minor episodes. The bo ridaries between

major episodes are indicated by double slash marks; those between minor episodes by e

single mark.

There r a number of features worth mention here. First, if this writer's

performance were merely observed, it would appear to be a long 160 seconds of pausing,

broken only by the act of shutting the door and ended by the transcription of the first

sentence. The protocol, however, reveals a substantial and complex body of planning.

Even during verbalizing, pauses still occur and those of 2 seconds or more are noted with

superscript numbers. The coding of the protocol reflects our model (Hayes and Flower,

1980, Flower and Hayes, in press. a) and distinguishes between the processes of Planning,

Translating (producing written text). and Reviewing Here text produced by the writer is

underlined once, reading is underscored twice.

Note that the first episode ends with a metacomment--a familiar enough ploy for

diverting attention from the task at hand. Episode two begins with a renewed attack on

the assignment, which told subjects to work as if they were free-lance writers. The third

episode breaks into smaller internal units or minor episodes. Like many of the episodes

focused on the act of Translating or producing prose, it is relatively long and broken into

minor episodes by brief evaluative comments and attention to side issues; yet the thread

of composition is not lost. Such episodes seem directed by an overall plan that can

sustain changes'rn topic and can cross paragraph boundaries. In this case, notice how

adroitly the fragment of test produced in Episode 3 responds to the audience analysis.

implicit goals. and plans which preceded it. As we will try to Show in the rest of this

paper. these episodes are goal-directed planning units in which writers work.

37

6.1. Evidence for an Episode Structure

Our analysis of the 'ontent of "pregnant pauses" will rest on two assertions we

have attempted to verify:

1. That the "composing episodes" are real; that is, that they represent meaningfuland verifiable units of ceocentration in which writers normally work.

2. That by looking at the bour(daries which occur between episodes we are infact looking at many of the longer, "pregnant" pauses noted by overvationalresearch.

Although these episode patterns had intuitive validity to rea_lers of the protocr4s,

we looked or converging evidence to support their reality and the reliability of our

boundary judgments. One content free indication of a boundary comes in the form of

signal words such as "all right," let's see." and "okay." In three of our four writers these

signal words clustered significantly (p< 001) around episode boundaries (i.e.. appearing in

either the immediately preceeding or succeeding clauses). The fourth writer simply didn't

use signal words. Such expressions seem to indicate a sense of opening or closura as in

"okay, now.." or "that's okay." Or they worked as filler in the writer's t ansition from one

episode to the next. (Although many boundaries are sharply defined points. some are one

to three clause transitional units containing false closures, false starts. and

metaccmments.)

Moct of the evidence for episodes and their boundaries, however, depends on the

m:ernal logic of the protocol itself As Table 6.2 shows. when judges study the protocol

carefully and know it well. they achie,e high reliability in judging boundaries These

knowledgeable" judges were merely instructed to look for units of coi.:entration in the

writer's process and to mark a boundary when they saw the writer shifting it.icus.,

changing a train of thought, or setting up a new plan. These judgements did show a

threshold effect (as verified by the Gutman scaling technique)--some judges simply had

broader criteria for selecting boundaries and noted more of therm However, even with

38

these differLnces, out of a total of 248 boundaries selected by our four knowledgeable

judges. two or more judges agreed on 70% of these boundaries. A random selection

predicted by a multinornial probability test would have yielded only a 20% agreement.

Insert Table 6.2 about here

For comparison, the protocols were then judged by four more readers whom we

called "intuitive judges" because they had not studied the protocols and were given no

instructions beyond "Use your intiution to mark what you see as meaningful episodes in

the process of the writer's thought." As a control they were given a set of markers

slightly greater than the number of major and minor episodes noted by the

knowledgeable fudges As one might expect, the intuitive judges created many more

idiosyncratic boundaries (i.e., those chosen by only . ie judge). Neverthel&.s, of the 290

boundaries they marked, two or more judges agreed on 50% of the boundaries. They~I.

showed even stranger agreement an the "official" boundaries (i.e, those selected by two

or mi., 3 knowledgeable judges). Two or more of the intuitive judges seinted over 90%

of these boundaries (whereas, a probability test would predict only 13%) and three or

more fudges agreed on 73% (compared ) the even smaller probability prediction of only

.5% agreement) Finally, we asked a group of twenty-two writing researchers attending a

seminar on protocol analysis to make intuitive judgments on yet another protocol and

found that eight readers or more agreed on 70% of all the boundaries chosen by the

group (here probability would predict such agreement on only 00000118% of the

boundaries). We think these results are remarkably strong.

The goal of this initial analysis was not to create a well-specifir.d definition of

episodes, but simply to gather prima face evidence that they do indeed exist as complex,

yet strongly visible units within the composing process. We can sum up he findings in

this way You can't expect every reader to agree on all the boundaries; yet major

39

episode boundaries have a high intuitive discernibly. The selection of minor or sub-

episode boundaries will be more Idiosyncratic since readers respond to a wide range of

events such as precess shifts between planning, translating, and editing; shifts in topic;

and the intrusion of metacomments. However, knowledgeable readers--that is, people

who carefully study the content and logic of the entire protocolwill come to high

agreement in choosing episodes. The importance of "knowing" the protocol also reveals

a key fact about episodes. Episodes are not like paragraphs of a text, organized around a

central topic which a casual reader can easily follow. Instead, episodes seem to be

organized around C#031S, so that one episode could include various topics and various

processes from planning to editing- -all tied together by their relevance to the writer's

current plan or goat Readers who know the protocol well are more aware of this overall

structure

7. Evaluating How Writers Generate Ideas

An important part of the planning process as it is described in our model is idea

generation. In this section, we present data which helps us to describe idea generation

more fully.

This study started with the hypothesis that an important difference between good

aria poor writers lies, not simply in their ability to express ideas in written speech, but in

the very strategies they use to generate those ideas in the first place We had observed

that poor writers. in their attempt to find a focus or thesis for a paper, often seemed tied

to the topic. while more expermoced writers appeared to be responding to a larger

rhetorical problem--a problem which included the reader and their own goals (Flower and

Hayes, 1980).

If this hypothesis were true it would mean a number of things. First, if poor writers

are obsessively focused on the topic to the exclusion of the larger rhetorical problem, it

could help explain why they often are more likely to violate conventions of the

WVaarlexImQW11111111111111111101111

40

appropriate when they write, but not when they speak. In face-to-face conversation oniy

ancient mariners are likely to ignore the rhetorical situation. Secondly, it the rhetorical

situation itself helps stimulate plans and ideas. it could explain why so many poor writers,

including the ones in our experiment, often seem to "run out of ideas." Finally, if a

significant difference between good and poor writers is the strategy they use to generate

ideas, this would suggest that evaluating or editing the final product gta product is

unlikely to produce dramatic change. A more effective teaching technique would focus

on the writing process itself.

To test this hypothesis we collected, on tape, verbal protocols of nine writers

composing aloud. Four were people on the university staff who liked to write, who had

done writing, and who were considered by their peers to be "good" writers In contrast

to this group of "good" or experienced writers, we studied a group of "poor" writers who

had come or been sent to the Communications Skills Center for general problems with

organization and coherence. Two of these "poor" writers were graduate students, two

undergraduate, none had difficulty with basic grammar or sentence structure

Each subject wrote on an assignment about which they would have topic

info,r,ation, but which created significant audience constraints They were told to work

foe approximately an hour and to verbalize everything that went through their minds as

they wrote We analyzed these transcripts in two steps first, by isolating each new idea

that was generated during the session (see Table 7.1). A new idea was defined as any

Complete grarnmeical unit, including complex statements with dependent clauses

However, if such a complex statement was generated in two attempts separated by long

pauses or intervening material, it was coded as two ideas. Our goal was to code as one

unit those ideas which were being retriced from memory as a unit, and to code as new

all new attempts to expand or develop an idea Changes which affected merely the

wording or sentence structure were budged on the basis of our model of the writing

1

41

process to belong to the process of "translating," not "generating," and were not counted

(Hayes and Flower, 1980).


Our second step was to discover where each of these new ideas came from.

Therefore we categorized each new idea in one of three ways, as a response to either:

1. the larger rhetorical problem, including the topic,

2. the topic alore,

3. a current element in memory.

The basic purpose of this categorization was simple. Within a given body of ideas,

we wanted to see what per cent of those ideas were generated as a response merely to

the topic alone (or to a current element in memory) or alternatively, as a response to not

only the topic, but to the larger rhetorical situation as well.

We used the following taxonomy to decide into which category a new idea should

be placed:

1. An idea was categorized as a response to the rhetorical problem if it indicatedone of the following: a concern with the writer's Purpose or Goal; anindication of the writer's sense of Audience; or a concern with the writer'ssense of Self or Persona. A writers concern with purpose or Goals took twomajor forms either as a statement of purpose (e g , "I need something herethat pulls you in") or as a recognition of some of the formal features ofwritten text Statements such as, "I'll use this as an introduction," indicatedthat the writer was see.ng her ideas in the larger contaAt of writing a paper orarticle Ideas which responded to the audience weie sometimes direct ("MakethiS friendlier; its for a young audience") or implicit (e g.., "I'll list the names ofthe most fascinating drinks'). Writers generated ideas in response to theirprojected Self or Persona with comments such as. "I'll appear like an idiot."Finally, some statements combined a number of these elements, such as "Thismay not be the best term for ten-year-olds, but it maintains the rhythm."Any idea which showed some response to the larger rhetorical problem. then,was placed in the first category

2 The second category was reserved for new ideas which were judged as

42

simply information generated in response to the topic alone, such as "Awaitress has a number of duties, first...." Often these ideas appeared to bethe result of a straight memory search of what the writer remembered aboutthe topic.

3. The final category was necessary to account for new ideas which appeared to, be connected by some association to a recent thought or current item in

memory, but which were not relevant to the rhetorical problem or to thetopic. Both good and poor writers appear to go off on these short trains ofassociation; the difference is in how frequently they do it.

As we expected, it is difficult to get complete agreement from judges on the

absolute number of new ideas, since different judges are likely to have 'ifierent

thresholds for distinguishing new ideas from mere rewordings of old ones. Therefore, as

a check on our method we conducted the following test using a set of 73 ideas which

were judged as new ideas by all four judges in the experiment. The critical judgments in

this study are the categorizations: is a gil...1 idea a response to the rhetorical problem or

merely to the topic or a current element? And can judges agree on making those

categorizations? In a universe of 73 ideas which all four judges had selected .a.s new

ideas. there was complete categorization agreement on 52 ideas or 71%. Three judges

agreed on 69 responses or 94.5°/e. There was a two or three-way split on only four ideas

This percentage of agreement confirmed our sense that such categorization is reliable

7.1. Results

The results of this analysis were striking, especially since our subjects did not

represent the extremes of either good or poor writers and there was not attempt to

account for or control individual differences. Nevertheless, as Table 7.1 shows, the poor

writers as a group generated on 28% of their new ideas in response to the rhetorical

problem, the other 72% were in response to the topic and/or a current element in

memory. For the good writers this 30/70 distribution was nearly reversed Good writers

generated 60% of their new ideas in response to the rhetorical problem in some way;

only 400/ci of their ideas were a response to the topic or current element alone.

43

As you can see in Table 7.1, there is a significant spread among the poor writers,

but as a group they remained distinct from the good writers. On the basis of a Pitman

randomization test, these results were significant at the .01 level; that is the probability

that this difference etween the groups would have arisen by chance is less than 1 in 100

(Siegel, 1956).

8. Formulating Sentences in Writing

In the previous several sections, we have examined the planning process, the first

major process in our writing model in considerable detail. In this section, we turn to the

second major process, Translation

How do people actually write sentences? When asked ourselves this question, we

found that there was a great deal we didn't know We knew, of course, that writers' plans

are very important, but we weren't sure of the extent to which the writers' plans

determined the details of the sentences written nor of the extent to which the experience

of composing sentences modified the writers' plans We didn't know if sentences are

composed as a whole or if they are assembled from separately composed parts Further,

we didn't know if there were differences in the processes experts and non-experts use to

compose sentences

This paper explores all three of these questions. In the first section, we will discuss

the relatpon of planning and sentence composition. In the second section, we will present

data on the processes by which writers compose sentences We will propose a model to

:iccount for the data In the third section, we will describe differences in the way experts

and non-experts compose sentences

In conducting this research. we were guided by our model of written composition

(Hayes and Flower, 1880) In this model (see Figure 2.1 Section 2), we proposed three

major writing processes. PLANNING, TRANSLATING, and REVIEWING The function of the

PLANNING process is to set goals and to establish a writing plan whith will guide tte

47

44

production of text. The TRANSLATING process acts under the guidance of the writing

plan to produce written text. The function of the REVIEWING process is to improve the

quality of the text.

Below, we will present observations of people writing formal sentences, and use

these observations to develop a detailed model of the TRANSLATION process and its

relation to PLANNING.

8.1. The Relation Between Planning and Sentence Construction

We observed writers as they wrote essays on topics such as "My Job- and

"Abortion: Pro and Con- for teenage audiences. The writers were asked to "think aloud"

while writing. The resulting protocols were tape recorded and transcribed Our subjects

were six expert writers chosen for their professional involvement in writing and six

subjects who were competent adult writers, but not professionals.

For some writers, planning prior to writing is very sketchy, apparently consisting of

little more than the choice of a general topic or perhaps a decision to write in simple

language. Others plan more extensively--developing lists of subtopics to be discussed in

a particular order--before any sentences are written.

Plans influence the way in which sentences are written. The order in which topics

are discussed in the final essay is typically closely related to the order in which they are

listed in the notes the writer made during planning.

The left nand columr )f Figure 8.1 shows the plan for oryanizing the essay by one

of the expert writers as revealed by his protocol and by his notes written before he

began to construct formai sentences. The right hand column shows the sequence of

topics and subtopics in this completed essay.

Insert Figure 81 about here

45

For this writer, the relation between plan and essay was very close.

One output of the PLANNING process is typically a sequence of brief written notes

of two kinds:

1. topic designations, e.g., -religious reasons," misery of being an unwantedchild: and

2. instructions to the writer, e.g., "introduction," "snapper line."

These two kinds of notes seem to serve rather different functions Topic designations

serve to remind the writer to include information about a particular subject matter. Often

it appears that the writer has this information preorganized for presentation in long-term

memory. Instructions to the writer, on the other hand, remind the author to accomplish

some rhetorical goal such as providing an app:opriz.v.: beginning or end to the essay.

Often they are content free or direct the writer to organize information at some later

time For example, an instruction such as "summary" will typically lead the writer to

organize content for a summary only after the essay has been written. .....

When the writer begIns to generate formal sentences, these brief notes will be

greatly expandea For the writer whose plan and essay are described in Figure 8 1, each

plan element gave rise on the average to 2 5 sentences and about 55 words. In word

count, the topics in the outline were expanded ahOut eight-fold on the average when they

appeared in the finished essay Expansion varied from a low in which a 29 word note

was transformed into 39 ..fiords of text to much more extensive expansions in wnich, for

eAarn0e, "snapper line" became a 53 word conclusion and the single word "age" gave rise

to 58 words of text.

As we noted above, our writers usually did not make outlines as complete as this

water did As a result, the smount of expansion from outline to essay for most writers is

greater than we observe here.

For none of the writers we observed was the order of topics in the essay exactly

45

46

the same as the order of topics in the plan. Many changes in plans occurred while the

writer was composing sentences. The writer whose plans are outlined in Figure 8.1

decided after writing section 2a(2) of the essay, "economic reasons," that section 2b of

the plan, "current con-position," was "repetitious" and eliminated it. After writing section

2a(3), he decided that section 2c was unnecessary. Later he decided that topic 4b in the

plan was really two topics and wrote it as such in 'he essay.

Clearly, then, the writer's plans influence the construction of sentences.

Constructing sentences, however, can also influence plans. Just how a plan will work out

isn't always clear until the writer tries to execute it. When he tries to put the plans into

words, he may well discover weaknesses and redundancies which were not obvious and

perhaps could not be obvious earlier.

The process of writing sentences can lead to more than lust a change in the writing

plan. It can also provide the occasion for writers to change their understanding of the

topic. In the protocol segment shown in Figure 8.2, the writer is trying to compose a

sentence about writing difficulties.


At first the writer seems to feel that the important problem is impulsiveness. By

the time the sentence es Completed, hov,eer. he decided that the real problem is lack of

planning

Our maul point here is that even when writers do make compete plans, there is still

plenty of work to do to construct formal sentences. We know this because

1 The plan will almost certainly be modified during TRANSLATiON.

2 The plan w:11 be expanded ten fold or more to produce the sentence And

3 Some elements in the plan are instructions to the writer such as

,ntrOduction" or "snapper line" which require the writer to add content at the

5(1

47

time of writing sentences.

We can summarize the relation between the PLANNING and TRANSLATING process

as follows:

1. The order of topics in the writing plan is closely related to the order of topicsin the essay. The PLANNING process clearly exerts some control over theTRANSLATING process.

2. When writing formal sentences, the writer greatly expands the topicsdesignated quite briefly in the plan. The TRANSLATING process, then, takesthe plan as input and builds on it.

3. Writing sentences can lead the writer to modify the writing plan. TheTRANSLATION process, then, can exert some reciprocal control overPLANNING.

8.2. What Happens When Sentences Are Written?

The top part of Figure 8.3 is a protocol segment in which the subject was

composing and writing down the sentence shown at the bottom This segment shows all

of the important features of sentence generation that we have observed in our sample of

writers. First and most important, the subject constructs sentences by proposing and

evaluating sentence parts


Items 1, 4. 6, 9. 12, and 17 are proposed sentence parts. Items 10. 13. and 15 indicate

evaluations In addition, the protocol segment reveals three other processes:

interrogation, goal setting. and rereading Items 2 and 8 are interrogations. It is very

common for subjects while they are writing to ask themselves questions such as. "What

do I want to say?", "What do I mean?", "What did he do?", or simply, "What?" We assume

that these interrogations reflect memory search processes in which the writer is trying to

find information to be used in constructing the sentence.

Items 3 and 5 are instances of goal setting in which the writer specifies some

., 51

48

properties desired in the sentence without producing them.

Items 11, 14, and 16 are instances of reading.

The average size of proposed sentence parts for our 12 subjects was 9.29 words,

and the average number proposed was 2.78 parts per sentence. Of the words proposed

in,.the form of sentence parts, just over three-quarters (.76) were included in the final

sentence Thus the process of proposing sentence parts appears to be a fairly efficient

one

Of all the protocol segments which correspond to sentence construction:c

* 18% contain ;.ine or more interrogatives

* 66% involve rereading of previously currently being written, and

* 8% involve rereading of previously written sentences

Rereading of the current sentence, then, I., much more common during the TRANSLATING

process than rereading of sentences composed earlier.

Figure 8.4 shows a model of the TRANSLATION process which accounts for many of

the observed behaviors. The model assumes that in constructing sentences, the writer

will try to follow a sequence of plan elements formed earlier. If a plan element is

evaluated negatively, or if for some reason there is no plan element, then the writer will

initiate PLANNING. In both PLANNING and EVALUATING, the writer may and often does

make use of informaticn derived by reading the context of the sentence to be produced


Once a plan element is selected, the writer will attempt to express it by writing one

or more sentences This will be done by proposing and evaluating sentence parts If the

writer had difficulty in proposing a part, then she/he may reread the context of the

sentence ("to get a running start ") or may ask a clarifying question such as. "What did he

52

49

really do?" or. "What am I trying to say?"

If a proposed part is evaluated positively, it is added to the current sentence buffer.

We assume that parts are added to the sentence buffer from left to right and that at any

time the buffer contains the first or left hand part of a sentence. We believe that it rarely

or never contains a sentence part which is detached from the beginning of the sentence.

A sentence part may evaluated negatively because it fails to match the intended

plan. For example, the proposed part may state so. tething either more general or

something more specific than the writer intended. If the writer continues to have

difficulty in finding a part to add to the current sentence buffer, she/he may start over by

clearing the sentence buffer.

When a sentence is completed, the writer must decide if the current plan element

has been completed. If not. she/he will compose more sentences until the plan element

is completed If so, the write: will look for a new plan element.

$.3. Differences Between Experts and Non-experts

Generally, the protocols of the expert writers resemble those of the competent

writers Both groups construct sentences by proposing and evaluating sentence parts,

and both groups engage in interrogation, goal setting. and rereading of the current

sentence There are, however, two consistent differences between experts and novices7Experts write longer essays and experts propose longer sentence parts. Table 81 shows

ithe essay length and sentence part length for the experts and non-experts Both/

differences are significant beyond the .05 level by the Mann-Whitney test.


An independent rater measured sentence part lengths for two of the subjectsS4

and S7--and obtained average part lengths of 12.23 words for S4 and 7 30 words for S7

5.3

50

The four experts who proposed long sentence parts (Subjects 1, 2, 3, and 4) wrote

essays which were ranked first, second, third and fourth by panel of judges who judged

all 12 essays. The experts who proposed short sentence parts (Subjects 5 and 6) wrote

essays which were ranked 9th and 10th in quality by these same judges. There is some

reason, then, to believe that the average length of the sentence parts which a writer

proposes when he is constructing sentences is related to the writer's skill in writing.

What mechanism could be responsible for such a relation?

Simon and Chase (1973), studying skin in chess, concluded that the advantage

which chess experts have over novices depends on a enormous amount of pattern

knowledge which they acquire during thousands of hours spent in analyzing chess games.

The fact that experts have more and larger patterns than those available to novices

allows the expert to think of chess games in larger units than novices can use. Perhaps

thousands of hours spent constructing sentences enables the expert writer to work in

larger units than those with less experience.

In contrast to the fluency shown by experts, the sentence constructing processes of

poor writers may be interrupted frequently by difficulties with low level processes. Figure

8 5 illustrates this sort of difficulty in a student who had been referred to a writing clinic.

Spelling, orthography, and even the simple matter of handling a pencil occupy so much of

the writer s attention that he has considerable difficulty keeping track of his sentence.

Cur competent and expert writers ramly ,.ave difficulties with low level processes

insert Figure 8 5 about here

In poor writers. then, fluency is strongly influenced by mastery (or lack of masteryl

of low level skills. in competent and expert writers, vie propose that fluency depends on

the acquisition of large quantities of sentence pattern knowledge.

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51

9. Implications for Teaching

Our research on the composing process has a number of implications for teaching.

It sug,ests some important additions to what we teach: we need to teach students to

understand and analyze their own thinking process just as they now do their writing

products. And we need to reconsider how we teach, when the content of such teaching

is not content specific knowledge but Process skils. Teaching heuristics and thinkinn

strategies -- trying to affect performancecalls for new techniques. In summing up the

implications of our research for teaching, we would emphasize three important

observations supported by our work.

1. There are important differences in how expert and novice writers handle theprocess of writing.

2 Many of the heurstics or strate:lies experienced writers employ are emirentlyteachable.

3 One of the most promising areas for improving students' writing is in theneglected art of planning.

9.1. Implication 1

There are important differences in how expert and novice writers handle the

process of writing This difference was particularly evident in a study of how writers

definod their own rhetoncal prvblern- -what elements of the task they attend to and how

rich nd c( mph:. P "epresentation they built

1. Go .ers rAcpond to all aspects of the rt^"orical problem. As they compose

tr.dy build a ungive representation not only of their audience and assignment. but also of

their goals involving the audience. their own mane. and the text. By contrast. the

problem representations of the poor writers were concerned primari'y with the features

and conventions of a written text. such as number of pages or magazine format

2 In building their problem representation. good writers create a pe:rticularly rich

network of goals for affecting their reade Furthermore. the&.:s gals. based on affecting

55

52

a reader, also helped the writer ge. -'rate new ideas. In an earlier study we discovereo

that our experienced writers (a different group this time) generated up to 60 per cent of

their new ideas in response to the larger rhetorical problem. Only 30 per cent were in

response to the topic alone. For example, a writer would say, "I'll want an introduction

that pun you in," instead of merely reciting facts about the topic, such as As an

engineer the f'-et thing to do is . . . ." In the poor writers the results were almost

reversed 70 per cent of their new ideas were statements about the topic alone without

concern for the larger rhetorical problem. All of this suggests that setting up goals to

affect a reader is not only a reasonable act, but a powerful strategy for generating new

ideas and exploring even a topic as personal as "my job."

As you might easily predict, plans for affecting a reader also give the final paper a

more effective rhetorical focus For example, one of the novice writers, whose only goals

for affecting the audience were to "explain [his) job simply so it would appeal to a broad

range of intellect," ended up writing a detailed techr..cal analysis of steam turbulence in

an e!ectrical generator. The topic was of considerable importance to him as a future

research engineer, but hardly well focused for the readers of Seventeen

3 Good writers represent the problem not only in more breadth. but in depth As

they write. they continue to deelOp their image of the reader. the situation. and their

c...,,n goals with increasing detail and specificity We saw this in the writer who came

task to re :Ise and elab3rate her image of he.' fashion-consuming reader By contrast.

ccOr ...r.ters often remain throughout the entire compos.ng period with the flat.

unde,:etcped, COn4ent.onal representation of the problem with which they started

The main conclusion of our study is this good writers are simply solving a

different problem than poor waters Given the fluency we can expect from native

speat:ers. this raises an important iuestion Would the performance of poor writers

chan:e if they too had a richer sense of vhat they were trying to do as they wrote. or if

56'

53

they had more of the goals for affecting the reader, which were so stimulating to the

good writers? People only solve the problems they represent to themselves. 014r guess

is that the poor writers we studied possess verbal anc. rhetorical skills which they fail to

use becir..:se of their underdeveloped image of their rhetorical propie-n. By narrowing a

rhetorical act to a paper-writing problem. their representation of the problem doesn't call

on abilities they may well have.

The second implication we see in our own t:tady is that the ability to explore a

rhetorical problem is eminently teanabie. Unlike a metaphoric "ciscovery." problem-

finding is not a totally mysterious or magical act. Writers discover what they want to do

by insistently, energetically exploring the entire piablem before them and building for

themselves a unique image of the problem they want to solve A part of creative thinking

is just plain thinking

Exploring a topic *lone isn't enough As Donald Murray put it "writers wait for

signals" which tell them it is time to write, whi 1 "give a sense of tlosure, a way of

handling a diffuse and overwhelming subject." Many of the "signals" Murray described,

such as having found a point of view, a voice, or a gene, parallel our description of the

goals and plans we saw good writers making If we can teach students to explore and

define their own problems, even within the constraints of an assignment, we can help

them to create inspiration instead of wait for it

9 2. Implication 2

The process of writing is not a simple, step-by-step process However, many of

the heuristics or strategies which aid experienced writers are eminently teachable Three

implications for teaching I- -' iristics stand out:

I Heuristics do not offer a step-by-step formula for how to write. They areavailable. and powerful, but optional techniques for solving problems along theway Although it makes sense, in general, to plan before you generate and togenerate ideas before juggling them for a reader, these processes can often

57

54

be collapsed together in a writer'3 thinking. Furthermore, as our subjectsshow, the entire process and construct may be reiteratedtime and again at all levef of the kocess, from the act of articulating a keyphrase to producing a sentence, pargraph, or entire paper. Problem solvingasks the writer to trade 14 his/haf set of rules for :low to Write (Gather,Outline, and Write), which never worked too well aeiway. for a set ofAlternative Ways to Reach Your Goal When You Write.

2. A second basic ?act about teaching heuristics is that people must experiencia new thinking technique to learn it. Brainstorming, for example, is a9acquired skill and may ga against the grain for writers geared to producirigusable prose on a first sitting Students will not blithely relinquish theirhabitual coinnosing techniques, no matter how inefficient, at the sight of anew idea. To make a new heuristic an available option it must be presentedas a classroom exri, .ance which ensures that the writer actually learns howto use and apply a new technique Even the inexperienced writer is never atabula rasa. he comes equipped with many well-engrained, if counter-productive habits It is one thing to teach students a new formula. another toactually change behavior But writing. like problem-solving thinking ingeneral, is a performance art. Unless we deal with writing as a form ofthinking, we hove simply taught the student the ropes of another classroomgenre-the composition paper

3 Finally, a problem-solving approach to writing works for many writers becauseit allows for the disorderly dynamics of serious thinking and encourages onanalytical and experimental attitude in the writer. Heuristics ask the studentto see writing as a communication problem they are setting out to solve withall the strategies they can muster. In practice, perhaps the most remarkableresult of using heuristics is that early in the course students develop aconviction that writing is an important skill they can in fact master.Obviously, such a conviction is not always one hundred per cent warranted.but in replacing the mystique of talent and the fear of failing with thepossibility of an attainable goal, problem solving helps writers draw retire Sullyon the abilities they do have.

9 3. Implication 3

Finally, in teaching strazegies for the writing process, one of the most promising

areas is in teaching the often neglected are of planning

In a recent talk, Richard L Larson took English teachers to task for the way we do

and don t teach write! s to plan. According to his informal survey of cuisent textbooks,

our instruction in planning is limited to teaching a few old war horses and is focused

Quite decidedly on the written product, not the writing process. If students followed only

53

55

our teaching (and apparently it's a good thing they don't), the only kind of planning they"

would do would be limited to 1) making and outline, 2) choosing a method of

development and 3) deciding on transitions. In reali f, as Professor Larson points out,

writers also need to plan what they want to do in a piece of writing and where they want

-0..1 leave the reader.

Thzt statement seems an uncontestable piece of common sense. And yet, would

we agree with :t7 Is the common sense support of planning in conflict with the equally

reasonable assumption that writing is a process of discovery? Many of us would argue

that writers find where they are going on the way to getting there. And furthermore, thatJ

planning. especially the lockstep of an outline, can for.:.e a writer to leave the wandering

path of discovery in favor of mar:hing down a straight and narrow-minded path to t;ie

end of the theme According to t'le discovery method, planning may indeed help you get

there sooner, but the destination tou reach may not be worth the trip.

We could state the dilemma in this way. The act of producing a rhetorically

effective, purposeful piece of writing depends on highly goal-directed thinking, on making

plans On the other hand, the equally important act of making meaning where none

existed, of turning o,i experience into ideas, is a discovery procedure fostered by the

freedom to explore by-ways and follow unmarked paths that no plan could foresee

The practical problem for us as teachers is how to resolve this conflict, car. we give

students the power of planning without denying the experience of discovery, Textbooks,

insefar as they reflect teaching methods, often fan into one of these two camps.

emphasizing either hardline traditional methods of planning (outlines, methods of

. development. etc.) or discovery procedures such as pre-writing or free writing This

suggests that writing can be either an act of honest and creative self-exploration. or it

can be an act of planned , rhetorically effective problem-solving. But we seem to be

saying. it can't be both.

56

In contrast to this apparent dichotomy in teaching, research in composing process

suggests that good writers do both. In my own work with John R. Hayes studying the

thinking processes of writers, we see writers make plans to explore a topic, to discover

conflicts, to figure out what they really mean, and at the same time make plans to

produce written discourse and to deal with a reader. One of the important problems

writers face, but teachers teach, is how to map these various plans onto one another and

to coordinate exploration and communication to serve a common goal.

I suggest we often fail to teach this interaction for precisely the reasons Professor

Larson mentionedour definitions of planning are limited and limiting. Let me qualify

that statement. when we ourselves write, our working definition of planning might be

quite broad and flexible, it probably includes all those things that go on when one is

driving to work or standing in the shower But what we teacn under the name of plans

may still be outlines, methods of development, and transitions

The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe the kinds of planning writers do

which combine the power of goal-directed thinking with the richness of a discovery

process We will look at three kinds of plans. plans To Do Something by writing, plans

To Say Something in writing, and plans To Discover Something through the act of

writing itself But first let's take a brief look at the nature and power of plans

Contrary to the tradition of monumental sentence outlines glittering with Roman

numerals and two points beneath every sub-point, good plans are often only sketches in

the mind Plans help us write in three ways

1. Plans let people reduce large messy problems (such as be interesting") downto their essentials Architects do this when they create and revise sketchesinstead of experimenting in steel and concrete Writers do it when theychoose a focus, jot down notes on envelopes, draw pictures with arrows. orwrite outlines A plan, then, is a scaled down version of our solution to aproblem, a model which abstracts the essentials from a problem and allowsus to mentally manipulate those essentials first

2 This reveals a very important fact about plans Since a plan allows us to test

57'

out a solution in the way an artist uses a sketch, a good pLirl must bedetailed enough to test, but cheat) enough to throw away. That is why thoseelaborate early outlines often fait to produce good writing or help the writer.They are so expensive to create, they are less a plan than a shackle. Theylock writers into a premature solution before they have even entered theproblem. A good plan, then, is a sketch which sets up goals and alternativeswhich, in turn, keep the writer focused on the essentials of tne problem, notthe details of a particular solution.

3. Plans. at least some plans, have another characteristic. They give writers aset of steps or procedures for getting from where they are to where theywant to be. We say that good plans of this sort are operational; they help usact. One way to see if a plan is operational is to put it in the form of a goalstatement. Then see if it suggests how to proceed; if it offers built-in "how-to" cues for how to achieve the goal. Compare these two goals. one with"how-to" cues. one without: (1) I want to be rich and famous, versus (2)want to study probability, statistics, and writing so I can get rich quick at LasVegas and become famous writing a bestseller on how I did it. A writer mightmake a goal such as be persuasive" wore operational by saying, 1 want toargue forcefully both sides of this controversy to show the reader that I havepinpointed the crucial issues, but also to pave the way for my own ideas."Plans or goals without "how-to" cues are often highly abstract, for example, 1want to discuss team sports..impress my reader.. get an A in this course."Such plans may not offer the writer much help at all.

4. The third strength of plans is really a result of the first two. Because plansabstract a problem to its essentials and suggest ways to go about working onit, they help writers turn an overwhelming situation- -write that terrificpaper--into a manageable set of sub-problems By discovering andconcentrating on major sub-problems, such as the purpose of the paper,writers can handle each part better and reduce the anxiety of facing anunmanageable whole. As you might expect, good writers not only work onsuch sub-problems but have a variety of strategies for integrating the partsinto a whole For example, writers can delay consideration of a lower levelconcern such as spelling, grammar, or even organization until they haveworked out what they might want to say. But at the same time they continueto consolidate and reorganize what has gone before as their ideas develop

9.4. Teaching Planning Versus Doing It

Teaching has a lot in common with planning. We break a complex process down

into parts and teach people how to use the parts But inevitably. we leave the work of

integrating those parts into a whose up to the student The process of writing is too

complex to give anything like a recipe for It. But at the same time we must not confuse

61

58

the parts we teach with the process itself. This is particularly important with planning.

At the end of this paper I will offer three kinds of planning that we can teach as

independent planning exercises. In reality, of course, good writers use and integrate all

three kinds of plans which we as teachers must separate to teach. The question is, how

do good writers do that?

In trying to develop a model of such cognitive processes in writing, John R. Hayes

and I have used the method of protocol analysis to see what writers are actually doing as

they compose. In this research we ask writers to compose out loud, verbalizing

everything that goes through their minds as they are writing The transcript of this tape

recording, which is called a verbal protocol, along with the writers' notes and manuscript

provides an extraordinarily rich record of the thinking processes that underlie the act of

composing. When we look at the planning processes writers use. two things stand out

1 Plans do not emerge fully blown at the beginning of a writing session. Theyare often generated in response to the writers purpose, topic, or audiencePlans begin as sketches that get changed and fleshed out as the writerexplores the problem.

2 The planning process (that is, for the writers who do make plans, and somedon't) continues throughout the writing process. V'e may place planning atthe beginning of a textbook and encourage it at the beginning of writing, butit is not a formal exercise like outline making. It is a thinking activity, almosta frame of mind, that characterizes the entire writing process of good writers.So, even though we may teach the kinds of planning outlined below asindependent activities, we need to also make clear how they fit into the largeract of writing

With that in mind let me descrioe three planning techniques which try to bridge

research and teaching by translating what good writers do into teachable techniques that

help people write.

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59

9.5. A Plan To Do

One of the most important but most untaught kinds of plans writers make are

rhetorical plans or plans To Do Something by writing. People write for a reason, and the

clearer they are about their goals the more likely they are to get there. In trying to

decide what they want To Do by writing, writers must define the rhetorical problem they

are facing: what do they think they are going to accomplish with whom, and how do

they think they are going to do it? Teaching students to do such rhetoric& planning, and

creating realistic assignments that require it, remind us that writing is a purposeful act

and not an exercise in style alone. Furthermore, rhetorical planning is an important way

good writers narrow down their search from all the possible things they could say about

a topic to the important things they want to say. Rhetorical planning simply makes it

easier to write well

Here is an example from a writer wno tried to map his plan for what he wanted To

Do by writing a letter to his Congressman. As you can see, it would have been easy to

simply write a list of facts about himself. Planning can escalate the problem The writer

must create and organize new concepts, not just 'print out" what he knows Such

planning sets new standards. and makes it possible to achieve them.

My purpose in vritIng is to convince the Congressman that I amthe best candidate for a legislative aid.

How do I cony Oa him that I'm the best applicant?

Show him that I am a personof purpose and determination

have set have set wayscareer goals to achieve them

college law school

Convince him that I possessthe skills that he would con-sider valuaole and hopefullybetter than other candidates'

analyticaland com-municationskills

govt. leader-experi- shipence roles

Another kind of Plan To Do writers often make is called an Impact Statement much

60

60

like the environmental impact statement a dam builder has to make, describing the effect

his dam will have on the land, wildlife, water and so on. An Impact Statement is focused

on the reader. For instance, the writer asks herself

In a few words, try to describe what I want to happen; what impact do I hopeto have? What do I want my reader to feel, or think, or maybe even do afterreading my paper? If my goal is to make an engineer, say someone like mycollege roommate, understand why people read poetry and maybe even come toenjoy it, how am I going to do this?

Clearly a review of the history of poetry won't do the trick. An Impact Statement

lets the writer plan with the reader in mind.

96. A Plan To Say

Once a writer has at least a start on what he or she wants To Do, i. makes sense

to try to plan what To Say. Here we are on the old familiar ground of outlines, but with

one distinction. Early in the writing process plans To Say might well be only sketches,

notes with arrows and stars. As models to be tested and changed and relined, they need

to be cheap enough to throw away. The later, more formal kinds of plans are really aids

to constructing tight, coherent text rather than generating possible ideas.

The following plan was done by a writer who liked to visualize his relationships.

Notice how it generates a set of things the writer could say in a personal profile, but

keeps those things within the context of what he wants to do by writing. Again compare

the result of this plan to the things he could have said had he chosen to simply describe

'My Job at Goodrich- .

Facts

Worker for Goodrich-

responsible for projects

developed 6 impeovenents

all engineering involved

Concepts

responsible

innovative

64

applied general theory

to real problems

developed cost effective

solution

61

,------;'

Worked for D'Alecy

successfully developed program

sharpened analytical skills

learned to shape complex

results to a model.

experienced

adaptable and

flexible

9.7. A Plan To Discover

For some writers the best plan is to begin by writing immediately. And this brings

us back to the question at the beginning of this paper. ho " can we preserve and in fact

foster the freedom to explore?

One way as by helping writers to build plans To Discover. When good writers "just

start to write" they are in fact calling on a rather sophisticated set of composing plans

This prr ^,edure should not be confused with undirected free-association sometimes

encouraged as "free writing They are not simply writing down what comes to mind

Instead, they are setting up conditions for discovery We could imagine them working

under a set of plans or private mental instructions such as these

iP

* don t try to be perfect it, just write and see where it leads

- don't worry about spelling, punctuation, etc

- follow an idea out altil it gets cold, then go on to a hot one

- don't worry about coherence and precise connections yet

* then after a period, go back. iN Ot to revise your text, but to see what you'veturned up

( 65

62

- what ideas look more promising, interesting

- how does this all fit together

- what implications, new ideas could I draw from this

In other words, when people write To Discover, they are working under a 'creative and

sophisticated plan which helps them handle the act of discovery better by consciously

fostering it. They are telling themselves how to carry out their own composing process.

It is not surprising that many students confuse this process with simply sitting

down and producing a paper from the top sentence down. it would look much the same

from the outside. But it is what's going on inside that makes all the difference. A writer

who has learned to plan has gained a degree of control over his or her Own writing

process

Teaching stuoents how they can make plans To Do, To Say, or To Discover can

offer them a genuinely useful skill. However, there is a difference between the complex

planning process writers really use, and the specific parts of it we isolate to teach. All

teaching techniques should probably carry a "product warning", mine would be this

techniques in a textbook look neat and orderly, but the process of writing isn't. Good

writers don't follow recipes or sit down and do planning exercises as they writs For

example, they may well be doing all three kinds of planning described here at the same

tome. What they do possess, though. are a set of options and powerful techniques, such

as planning, which they :.an use when they need them whether it is to help them to get

started. to get out of a block, or to Just carry on. Knowing such techniques lets writers

control their own writing process more and gives them the freedom to choose

alternatives as they write.

63

References

Baker,. S. The practical stylist. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1969.

Bitzer, L The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1968, 1, 1-14.

Britton, J.. Burgess, T., Martin, M., McLeod, A., & Rosen, H. The development of writingabilities (11-18). London: Macmillan, 1975.

Flower, L Writer-based prose: A cognitive basis for problems in writip0. College English,September 1979 tat 41, 19-37.

/Flower, L. Writer based prose' A cognitive basisfor proble s in vifroting. Manuscript in

preparation, 1979 Ca

Flower, L, & Hayes, J.R. The dynamics of composing: Making plans and Jugglingconstraints. In L. Gregg & E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing: Aninterdisciplinary approach. Hillsdale. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass6ciates, 1980.

Flower, L., & Hayes. J R. A co nitive process theory of writing. College Co position andCommunication, 1981, 3 365-387.

\Flower, L, & Hayes, J R. ProbI6-s lying strategies and the writing proceis College

English, 1979(a]. 39. 44 1.

Flower, L. & Hayes. J R. Processbased evaluation of writing: Changin he performance,not the product. America Educational Researcloci ion Convention. SanFrancisco. April 1979 (13). ______-

Hayes. J R., & Flower. L Identifying the organization of writing processes In L Gregg &E Steinberg (Eds ), Cognitive processes in writing: An interdisciplinary approach.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1980 .

Larson. R L The rhetorical act of planning a piece of discourse Beaver CollegeConference on Evaluation of Writing. Glenside. PA, October 1978

Lowenthal. D. & Vfason, P Academics and their writing Times Literary Supplement. June1977, Vol 24

Lowes, J L The road to Xanadu Boston Houghton Mifflin. 1927..1.

O'Hare. F Sentence-combining. Improving student writing without formal grammarinstruction. Urbana, IL' National Council of Teachers of English. 1973

Rumelhart. D. Notes on a schema for stories In 0 Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.).

Representation and understanding New York: Academic Press, 1975.

Simon, HA. & Chase, W.G Skill in chess American Scientist. 1973, 61, 394-403.

67

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r rt's r tr:a 7-rtr Iasi: %e rIxtedr.;be dr.ats r.o:

Figure 3,1 Segments of a proto:o3,

W, 07 IV 4.7 eNP PCESSUREG GRADESPS PrPlSOI:LL St 7:SFLCT'eN0 r t,,:.s ITY

1. e1\

20

4I lyL. C.

self

(..;

1%cure 3,2 7rP ''ricer's eevelo-in! knot..2edce

structure.

73

I. I: Thee is April. 1977. and Windy is s protocol e.n mouation.W Ok. um. the issue t rnoination and the problem of roust papers For

3. ono motiation hctc at Camerre31ellon is the acadrno: pressure and trades thatI sec intolsed. so I'd better put ohm down and packs 1m. die) land ofS. compel mc. that's really %sisal mouvorou IS. uM. kind of to impel 01 soar' 016. a momentum !Luse.} Ok. I suppose from the academic venom of the grades7 I m not sure whstheo-1 Mink petsonol satisfaction n tmpor.4...t but I'm not8. sine %Anita that awns Isom ilcadcmg grosuacs and trados, or uhetherI9. %so:mild sa; remorse! satislartion :s a memo ossue Ok. urn. Oh.

10 f What atc ;nu thinking?

II I'm 11)111 10 think Of the rum sentence so sun ssitis Urn. sna)bc something

12 like. personal sansfacion is the major morn aunt force in tae sensing of my13 Nowt and teflon 01. I m truing to ihm;, ofok, I %sant to sontebou rt it Into14 the ecioccnic ptcinci, 40%. trar, re.r;bc not so can 01 Not only do 1 fcrIS. satisfaction born my grotto. but I also get satisfaction in turning in something16 that is gaol qUalitr SO, of I'm hap'sy uhen i %sew a rood papas. it really doesn't

17 matter %shei kind of rt.& 1 fat back on it. tf I rn bow %stet it. So. um. um.IS Ire's re. Um, .'hat arc the -..1i1 010114' Of, tritir to tam personal

19. sAlIJCif011 tvci%tcn 3cedtinic ritcimoc and thc Etadci, bet I'm not really sloe20 Low to do .r. hos. to branch sr I'm troll) hasnt a hard mac rating started21 Well. ma; be I'll just sane a hunch of 'cleat doss's. and ma; be try "o onocrt them after

2? 1 finish 01 When I fecl4shat l'c unite's a hlril nuties.. and I put on paten2, Iftee, pipet nat. to he craded. %Own 1 submit it. the trade is non24. alssa necessar, for die teacher to hest the sonic Os. ohms kind of

?S. _1'11 citeet unh that ctic Os., atsclEel's sec %shit else. Um. but26. of courtc, the season I'm unroll the pert on the first place is for that vide.27 'nt to Matt that beet Thotc sue eic2c arc vcr) tot,IICKI.ed.(10)1C 0131% not28 the right Icon I'm. ot. I'm not al% a.s sure %sherbet nt) personal sausGarOn.

29 this n kind of off on a tantem, .id it rnotht not be included in IV) focal draft,

Figure 3.3 Wendy protocol.

74

InsNatural

Sentences from SAM Version:

2. Because of the emphasis on 4 Os here at ClAU, grades become an instinctivemotwatot for myself.

4. The initial motivator in the outset of writing a paper is the fact that agrade will be attached to it upon completion.6. Alter I begin writing a paper, the grade emphasis diminishes and ahigher level of personal satisfaction takes over.

Protocol Excerpt:

Urn because of tbe. maybe because of the empltasrsUrn 4 0's. Trying to bemore specrlic. Urn, even though I don't have a 4.0. Urn because of the emphasison 4.0*s. Ok, because of the emphases on 4 Ws, grades are maybe a natural, ormaybe instinctive, are instinctive motivator.

So urn, ok Th. 'mita/ motivator, thss is. grades are natutal instincsive rowel/mot.should say rnsirally again, but not really sure how to say it Ok. maybe I canleave it new-al, or instenrove--maybe that'll bring that Out. Urn, ok. rna0e I canrefer toward 'morally again Alter the urn. alter I begin porhaos, woding At% a

Paper, the fdcl that a grade, watt a minute. the fact that a grade. I don't knew if Iused later, attached-0k I did. I don't warn to use that again Ok. urn

After a begin writing a paper the glade ealphasisf don't know el I want to usethat main --the tootle emphasis is fOoeshado% eed by the by the fact or Maybel'fi come back and put that an, oh, Ok Alter I begin writing a paper the gradecrytphes.s is loreshaclowed by the something. urn, sorneitong that instead.1.11 have IV look up the vtading

vignrc 3.4 Turn[np tliourht.: int() Acceptable sentoncr.

""Phk f,"5",

75

J

The Rhetorical ProblemFitments of the Problem Examples

iTHE il...HriORICAL SITUATION]Exiger.cy 0t .A.ssignment

Audience

"Write for Seventeen tr.2..sar.ioe; thisis irnpossibk."

-Som:one like myself. but tditstedfor twenty years."

I

THE NI TER 5 OWN GOALS]invok in:. the

Reader "I'll chtne their notion of Engshteachers ..."

Persona or StV "I'll look Re 2.-) idiot if I say ..."

Hcz.n:ng So if I comp:re :hose two aTti-tudes . .."

1

Tral ' hrs: u 4-1: urn: tn Jr:rode:I:on

7ig...:re 4.1 Ele:-,ents f the rhetorical prob./a= writers:eon's'- to ther,selves in cc cosine.

, .A.:.1d)cr,ce S.::1 Text Mea-'-1.-

:;n 4'> s of rhe:o:ica! Art!ysis of Foals

2=...d .A. ssi z.:-.rnt :1; Tc:1.1s :.'.: i0 .A. -,4st nee

*,..1

0 0 3 7I

17

IE 1 11 1 5 ci 42

.1....z., zre .2. ::1..-1:,c..r cf t inES writer e:-7.1icf: tly -4.-.1-.resented

e.".) ?t-ect 0` .1-'P 1.....e:crf.cal 7:et...le in f!rst6,0 ilries cf protocol.

76

Pt,

TO DO

(RHETORICAL P1-414)

TO SAY To co14PDSE

IPPODVC7 -SLSEO) (PADCESS-eASED)

OENERLTE PRODUCEKRDwIED'..A XT Figure 5.1 Plan for dealing

with a Rhetorical Problem.

, TG op To cornzas TO SAY

h:t the SI.`,:V::::". totrkt r..,oloierri. atter-r.ale a;--oach is tosay

(

t .;-:t- Y. et ;-t el:

so these aPPlaetiorts aren't irri-:.s.r.ar..1 What is1-7.:-.am is vle

ahJe

c'C -;

5.' a 7rctccl'a: "crl'ing *,:y plan.

PLANS: 70 DO 70 COMPOSE 70 SAY

1, Wine an exposohonfor humanitiesteachers aboutMemory I fa groupof specializedmemory techni-ques).

2, What I'll do is jotdown randomthoughts about

3. What the teachersmight want to hearand I might want toto tell them.

4.

5. That word meansa lel but I won'texplain it now.

6.

7.

8.

9. One of the problemsin writing this essaywill be 10 expandon that usefulnessand mates' seemmore plausible. Tomake uses moregeneral and accept..able

7 6 Thal's the wrongword. s mean im-portant seeming

Uh Or. of that's

A iy)ont I will wantto rnake someplaceis *hal

Fact thong thatOccurs randomlyis encoding.

Thinking about ob-jections heard atthe workshop. Rolememory is trivial.

Memory I proce-dures are useful inmodern language.They are also moreuseful generally.

Unlonunately, bymore getteraty Imean thing% Megrocery II5

(I' Ontinue CII

PLANS: TO 00 TO COMPOSE TO SA

I. If we were to describeMemory I !as an example)what do we want 10 sayabout?

(Searches notes)lheoe it is. Leo's dothat.

2.

3. Let's see . nowwnai we Want 10 Ottacross in this plan.we want to Illustratethe practical nature

nature of skills

All right. / will taiketrakeas an example of Ilse sons ofmaterial . . , presented inthe course ... Now his isa Ierrible sentence but we canrevise it.

... the lint subunit of... unit... unit.

'That's not guile right, but, .

called Memo' y I In Memory I,Memo') :.. In Memory I thestudents learn ,_

Now wt, it am I going to dohere cause I don't Rally havean organization !co Memory Iyet.

... the students learn ...Now al this point we shouldbreak off and plan.

Note. Lines In nahcs arc Ir.orjrne.nis of the 0/Owing text interrupted by plans arid it-

comrnerds

1.110,ort 5.3 Prot ()col of the beginning of a w rl I. Inv:;en:, too.

Figure 6.1Episodes in an Expert Writer's Protocol.

Episode I My Job for a young - Oh I'm to describe my job for a

young, thirteen to fourteen year-,old teenage female

audience - Magazine - Seventeen. -a- My immediate

reaction ts that its utterly impossible. I did read

Seventeen, though - I guess I wouldn't say I read it -a-\

I looked at .t, especially the ads, so the idiawould be

to describe what I do to someone like myself when I read

- well not like myself, but adjusted for - well twenty

years late:. -a- Nov what I think of doing really is

that - until the coffee comes I feel I can't begin, so I

will snut. the door and feel the: I have a little bit more

////sode 2 TrIvaci, -1:7.:- Also the mention of a free-lance writer

is something I've - I've no experience in doing and my

sense .s that its a - a formula which I'm not sure I

know, so I Suppose what I have to do as -a- invent what

the formula might e, and - and then try to -a- try to

Include - events or occurzences or attitude or

ex:.--er.:ences In ry c,:n -,c'D tna._. would -a- that could ''..e -

//iiE7..!scfe 3a -.*.a: cc..:d te ;'era. .1n fc77..::a s^ la"e sea - I .

z.;:7-', -ne ...:-.:::: %an-. tc s-.art - ty w:I:lrs scretn:g -

t.7.a: Id%-: -a- a.._ a:. -.'-.e Q..= ....on of :r.e :eader - cf

t.'.al rCE7:f7 6.71 -a- : s::-.cse T.!%e. r.t.s: lnee7est:.ng t:17.

at..-. :ct: ....c,L::e 1-...s tnat :.: Is %g!..)y unlIkely tnat ...:

:::-::: s:t7 a: al: interes:1:; to sc-....".e of .hE: age - Fo

: chi zta:: t,:. say1:-.; scnetnIng :.,. ; :e - Can ycu Ira7:ne

s.:rFe:f szerdIrri Ya-y dv's 2.11 :e ::,:s - al:1;:c 1::.,

400BEST COPY Willa

E a7:. ht_ze. :eIlir; In yr.:r

cats... -a- walking out - out with coffee and a book and

watching the dawn materialize...I actually do

this...although 4:30's a bit early, perhaps I should say

5:30 so It won't seem - P.1-hough I do get up at 4:30 -a-

watching the dawn materialize and s_ar:inc to work - to

work by reading - reading the manuscript - of a Victorian

writer...with a manuscript of a...a Victorian writer...a

person with a manuscript of a student - Much like

yourself - Much like - Much like -a- a student or a book

tv ;:ristotle they've heard of Aristotle or - who could I

have .t be ty Plato.ozqatly vhen it gets to -Whon

you've... -a- fi.-.1cu-Idt coffee and whatever yoU had

to do (Oh thanks) - wnazever - now I've gotten just

coffee v-ur coffee (7u7.bling)...when you've

finiehed your coffee and -a- foreseen - and -a- ur,--mmmm -

when you've fsnithed your ocfee, you dress and drive -

ausou: three 7-_:es to the university w!ere szend

another - vh,re you spen! - spend !-ours - you spend

7:_rs a::-t tnrse a !my a-:v. three

-cre ni_rs :c ettdents - talking

istSi Wri

Episode 3b to - talking to other teachers...Um -/ should I (mumble)

- the thing is about saying teachers - the - the teenage

girl is going to think teachers like who she has, and

professor I always feel is sort of pretentious and a word

usually - usually I say teacher, but I know that means

I...It's unfortunate now in society we don't - but that

Episode 3c that isn't a prestige occupation./ Talking to other

people like yourselves - that's whoever it may be - other

people at your :cb - otner - other people like your sea; -

'.th a lot like yourseI' but - talking to other people like

yourself - going to meetings...coraittee meetings...and

doing all thir fc: nine months so that the other

ttree,..and doing all tnis for three months - okay - nine/non-its ...If you can inagine that....

Plan

1. The controversy about abortion

2. The con-T..i.tion

a. historically

1. religious.reason

2. economic reason

3. pro-14`e view

b. currently

1. religious

2. pro -life view

c. scaner line

Essay

1. An example of the controversy

2. The con-position

a. historically

1. religious reason

2. economic reason

3. pro-life view

3. Coum:er-argument 3. Ccumter'argument

a. Economic reason obsete'

b. religion less influential a religion less ialluential

c diversi:y cm moral issues b. diversity on moral issues

d. Supreme Cnur: view C. Supreme Court view

4. -we proposition L. The p:0-position

prcblems of unloved cnildren G. problems of unloved children

.:diems of poverty and ae b. problems of poverty

nc:hers

fc=t1c: --cw

c. proble=s of yo...1r:g and o::d

C. u=a7ried =ct^ers

e. fer

F Ccmclusionn;;;;cr

::::.;cr.ore of 7.1an and essay.

...The biggest mistake that beginning writers made is that they try to

write as -let's see - -write the first thing that comes into their mind--

write as soon as anything comes into their mind--try to write...that they

try ?o write...wri_e dog n whatever comesbut it's not that they write

down whatever cores into their minds- -some of them do thatyeahlike

uh--but some of the= are afraid to write anything dowm,..Okayso they

write a sentence at a -.-ime...The biggest mistake tba beginning writers

make is that they r...y to write without looking aheadyeah, I guess that's

better...they try to write without looking aheadthey onlythey or1y

think. cne sentence at a time and don't see where the next sentence is

going to lead than...

Figure 8.2 A In-ctocci seg=ent in which the writer appears to clarifyhis thinkins while ccnpcsing a sentence.

P:ctoccl:

Sf.t.tanco:

3 2 3

The c ast tn ing abcuz it is thatwhat? Sznathing abcu" using

4

allows me t:-.e zo--uh--I want tc write

S 6

Sc.matning er.put wy ideas--to ideas into action or to develop

7 E s :c

ideas intc-what? into a nAaninsful fcr=? Ch,

3 1 '.3 I+ ISt =a! urc--:.2.--al:cs =ascratch that.

:s

rte: Zttut i: is that it tc use/ n-y and

tdcas in a ---Vie. way.

The

:he cast it is

id Eat in a ;:.-scl,tti:e way.

al:cws me to use m-v mind and

exa--7.2a cf cent:nce gcncraticn.

START

.11

GET NEY.T ?LAN r1- ''`.. "7:ill no

no stored plan

t

1

52Rr'SS PI ^.14i

7 TV 7VT.... A. .

WRITE SEETENCE'

FROPCS:?ART

!ei lI

..INIM..

1

...111.=:....i

*-7.7---- ...7---=;D .0 C',:-.:..1 11

,... ... ... .......:.,.............

L

gios

,w11=11

rigure 8,4 ?:odel of Sentence Constluction.

-JO

TABLE 6.1Characteristics of Episodes

No. Mean il

Episodes Clauses/Epit.ode

DURATION OF EPISCDB8Range of (1:ime in minutes & seconds)

Clauses/ RangeEpisode

Expert

Vi25 9 1-23 22 sec. - 2 min.

8 min. 15 sec. 11 sec.

58 109 sec. -

1 - 4412 min.

1 min.

31 sec.

. , 7 sec. - 1 min.11 2 - 38 6 tin. 33 sec. 43 sec.

St,

Standa:dDeviation

2 mf.n.

S sec.N.

..

2 min.

1 sec.

1 .7.:::.

42 sec.

Oh, vhat can 1 say?--Drat, 1 broke the pencil point again - -keep

on breaking the pencil point - -I also have to-- i-e- drop the e- -to-do what.

is celled a - cuo:e hack-un - dash - seni-colonThis is a vav o: stcrint--. .. . .

-g- looks like an -f- on top - -o` stcrintuhthe,connuter--011, dratbrokk

4E again---for 4nCo.7ationuhto a roll of =aznetic tateMy -c- looks like

an -e- at the end cf zagnaric--I have to cnange thatLet ne get the eraser

out hereput it up on =7 pe%c42.--un--0%ayFeze ve goOkay, yhere a= 1 at?

Fiit.71 8.5 . 7.7cr atte=?tir4 to constr%:ct a sentence.

TABLE 2.1

Agreeme-at Among Raters in Assigning Properties to WrittenItems

/{V1 r Cala of $I W4 4.01

MarOtonws

A

935

1 A, 1 .93S

3 903

tt Law 146,-;

t 4th ott .924

"'Old droI

.9(4 CX&I

.910 952

9 S2

.v73 YA

TABLE 2.2Pro:ortion of Written Items With Each Property

.. 11 t,6,.. 4

..... W.I.

Sri 114J0

3S0 1540 CVO

Set own 2 Sri own J

004U90

b..*

0 6t70 LWD417

V.T,'E 2.3

7:c7.c:7?flOn. c Segr.enzs Assigned to Each P:ocess

1 2 St. ht.r1

1 4 1 A. 2 4. ,..t

.1:

L

: 1; 7 )

BEST COP1

TABLE 6.2Percent of Episode Boundaries Agreed Upon by Knowledgeable

Judges

WriterVo. of *

Jud esExpected

g% Agreement

Agreeing

Actual% Agreement

Expert 1 4

3

2

1

0

12

57

Expert 2 4

3

2

1

0

1

43

56

5A30 I

67%32

33

30

2070%

20

ao

Exile r' 3 4 0

3 1

2 12

1 b7

236

206t

34

Exert 4 4 0

3 1

2 10

1 69

Arcra:-c cf.

v---.--s

2 c.:

:-::-&.20

21

19 75%35

25

83

..-

Totalflew

ItIcaa

Reaponne to ) Reoponae toIthetorlent Reapoollo to Corraei

Problem Topic El clue it c

I Hete pont; c X Kt:upon:lcaht Lori co I to Top i c L

1.' r LA111:fit Current Clement

Cood

WrItera Cl 15H 106 48 67X 3374

62 9] 56 30 7 60 40

C3 115 66 45 57 42

Cl, 85 1.5 )6 4 5-.1 47

.11=1.11

Average 113 66 40 5 61X 119X

... .111... gr..... ........

Poo(Urigero P1 129 12 .66 41 17X 03X

PZ 05 20 6.1 2 24 16

P3 53 15 3I 1 20 12

PA 134 41 11 16 31 L9

P5 61 31 36 0 46 5411.11.

Avologe 94 26 56 1: MI 12Z

_Q)TABLE 7.1 Differences io How Good oi)d Poor WriLers GeneroLe Uew ideas

......... . ..,. .0.

ctoup

it.it Jo

?gni

J1

I

c.

TABLE 8.1Chunk Size and Essay Length of ExpArt and Novice Writers

11.

S Chunk

1 .

Ex-perts

c47e 1

..

zssav Lanzth S

Others

chl.mk Size 1 Essay Length

1 12.06 893 7 9.26 522

2 16.79 912 8 5.95;!

377.f.

3 13..c4 760MP

9 11.09 413 .

.

4 11.54 939 10 5.97,

451

5 8.68 656 11 7.10 704

6 4.76 553 12 .4.51 317

I.

;

e DOCUMENT RESUME ED 240008

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